How to Build a Social Media Marketing Intern (That Never Sleeps)

EDITOR’S NOTE

Hey there 👋

What if you could clone your best social media person but make them work 24/7, never ask for time off, and actually enjoy scheduling posts at 6 am?

That's what an autonomous social media AI agent can do for you.

In this issue, we'll show you how they work and how to build one.

Grab a coffee…this is a good one. ☕️

Let’s go!

TL;DR 📋

• We’re moving beyond AI assistants that require prompting to fully autonomous agents that manage complex workflows independently.

• Multi-agent systems are more powerful than single agents, with the most effective autonomous marketing systems combining specialized agents that collaborate.

• The architecture matters as much as the AI, because building an autonomous intern requires coordination layers, task-assignment systems, and integration with your existing tools.

NEWS YOU CAN USE 📰

Elon Musk is a fan of the 'social media for AI agents' site Moltbook. Others aren't so sure. The platform says it has over 1.5 million AI agent users, 110,000 posts, and 500,000 comments. Whether that's exciting or terrifying is up to you to decide. [CNBC]

Social media is becoming a search engine. Sprout Social's Q2 2025 survey found that 37% of people now search social media for product reviews and recommendations as opposed to Google. If you're ignoring that, you're leaving insight (and probably money) on the table. [Sprout Social]

The AI-in-social-media market is heading for $38.4 billion by 2035. That's a 28.7% annual growth rate. So no, this isn't a fad. [OpenPR]

Most marketing teams know they need AI. They're just not doing much about it yet. Typeface surveyed 200+ U.S. marketing leaders and found a growing gap between "we should use AI" and "we actually use AI." Sound familiar? [Typeface]

HOW AUTONOMOUS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING INTERNS WORK 🤖

Right, let's clear this up. This isn't ChatGPT with a social media login.

An autonomous social media intern doesn't wait for you to ask it to do things. It gets up in the morning (not really because it doesn't sleep), checks what's happening, creates content, schedules posts, replies to comments, tracks what's working, and adjusts its approach, all without you hovering over its shoulder.

Think of it less like an assistant and more like a small, tireless team that happens to live inside your computer.

The Five Core Agents You Actually Need

The trick isn't building one super-agent. It's building five focused ones that talk to each other. Here's how that breaks down.

1. The Content Creator

This agent writes your posts. It knows your brand guidelines, understands your audience, keeps an eye on what's trending in your space, and produces multiple variations of each piece of content. It also knows that a LinkedIn post and a TikTok caption are completely different things (because they are).

2. The Scheduler

This one figures out when to post. It looks at your historical data, works out when your audience is actually paying attention, and handles all the fiddly platform differences, so you don't have to think about time zones at 6 am.

3. The Analyst

The analyst watches what happens after you post. Which content got people talking? What fell flat? It spots patterns and (here's the important bit) feeds those insights back to the Content Creator so your output keeps getting better. No spreadsheet required.

4. The Community Manager

This agent keeps tabs on comments, DMs, and mentions across all your channels. It reads the room (or at least reads the sentiment), replies to the straightforward stuff, and flags anything tricky for a human to handle. It won't try to wing a PR crisis. It knows its limits. (We love that about it.)

5. The Brand Safety Checker

Before anything goes live, this agent gives it a once-over. Does it match your brand voice? Is it factually accurate? Could it accidentally offend anyone? If something feels off, it pulls the handbrake and sends it to a human for review. Think of it as the sensible friend who reads your text before you send it.

HOW IT ALL FITS TOGETHER

Five agents aren't much use if they can't talk to each other. So you need some plumbing behind the scenes.

Here's what that looks like (without getting too technical):

The Coordination Layer

This is the brain. It decides what needs doing, in what order, and who does it. It knows the Brand Safety agent needs to sign off on content before the Scheduler publishes it. Basic stuff, but someone has to keep track.

The Task Assignment Layer

When something new comes up — say, a trending topic in your industry — this layer decides which agent should handle it and makes sure the important things get done first.

The Dependency Management Layer

This makes sure things happen in the right order. Content before scheduling. Review before publishing. It stops the whole system from tripping over itself.

The Integration Layer

This connects your agents to everything else: your CRM, your analytics platform, your social accounts, your content library. The better this works, the less you'll need to copy-paste things between tabs. (And we all know that's where mistakes happen.)

The Learning & Feedback Layer

This is what makes the system actually get smarter over time. It captures what worked, what didn't, and feeds it all back in. So your intern improves without anyone having to teach it.

WAYS TO BUILD THIS (PICK YOUR ADVENTURE)

There are several ways you can build your autonomous social media marketing intern, each with different tradeoffs between ease of implementation, customization, and cost.

Here are the different approaches you can take + the apps you can use to set them up.

Option 1: Prompt-Based Orchestration

Use a powerful LLM (like Claude or ChatGPT) with detailed instructions to coordinate everything.

You provide the LLM with detailed instructions about your brand, your goals, and the tasks you want it to handle. The LLM then orchestrates the workflow. This approach is relatively quick to implement and highly flexible, but it can be unpredictable and may require significant prompt engineering. Tools like ChatGPT with custom instructions or Claude with system prompts can serve as the coordination layer.

Best for: Getting something working quickly without writing code.

Option 2: Workflow Automation Platforms

Platforms like Zapier, Make, and Gumloop offer visual workflow builders and prebuilt integrations with social media platforms.

These platforms make it easy to create automated workflows without coding. You can set up triggers (e.g., "when a trending topic is detected") and actions (e.g., "generate content and schedule a post"). This approach is accessible to non-technical teams but offers less customization than other approaches.

Best for: Teams who want automation without the engineering overhead.

Option 3: Custom Multi-Agent Frameworks

CrewAI, AutoGen, or LangChain give you maximum control over agent behavior.

You define each agent's role, capabilities, and constraints. You specify how agents communicate and collaborate. This approach requires technical expertise but enables highly customized solutions tailored to your specific needs.

Best for: Teams with developers who want something tailored.

Option 4: Enterprise Platforms

Platforms like Salesforce Agentforce, HubSpot AI Agents, or Typeface Arc Agents provide pre-built agent systems specifically designed for marketing.

These platforms come with built-in compliance and security, extensive integrations, and professional support. They're ideal for large enterprises but may be overkill for smaller teams.

Best for: Large companies that need security, compliance, and vendor support.

BUILDING YOUR AI SOCIAL MEDIA INTERN: A STEP-BY-STEP EXAMPLE 🛠️

Here’s a step-by-step guide to get you started on building your intern.

What You’ll Need

Before you get started, there are a few things you’ll need:

• A Make account (free tier works to start)

• An OpenAI API key (~$5-10/month for light use)

• Your blog's RSS feed URL

• A Slack workspace (or email works too)

Step 1: Define Your Goals and Guardrails

Before you write a single prompt, decide what you want your intern to do and, just as importantly, what you don't want it to do.

• Goal: "Generate three draft tweets per day based on our blog content."

• Guardrail: "Do not post anything without human approval. Do not engage with negative comments." Write these down. They're the foundation for everything else.

Step 2: Choose Your Platform

This is your first big decision and depends on whether you are using a simple automation tool or a more complex framework.

Look at the "Ways to Build This" section above and pick the option that best fits your team's technical skills and budget. For this guide, let's assume you're starting with the workflow automation platform Make.

Step 3: Feed It Your Brand Voice

Your agent needs to sound like you, so create a simple document with your brand guidelines. 

Include:

• Who we are: A one-paragraph description of your company.

• Our voice: A list of adjectives (e.g., "witty, helpful, professional, never arrogant").

• Good examples: Copy and paste 5-10 of your best-performing social media posts.

• Bad examples: Include a few examples of what not to do. 

You'll feed this document to your Content Creator agent in the next step.

Step 4: Build Your First Workflow (The Content Creator)

In your chosen platform (e.g., Make), create a new workflow. It will look something like this:

1. Add module → Schedule → Set to 9 AM daily

2. Add module → RSS → Enter your blog URL: https://yourblog.com/feed

3. Add module → OpenAI → Select GPT-4. You'll need an OpenAI API key from platform.openai.com, estimated cost: ~$0.10 per run

4. In the prompt field, paste: 

• "You are a Content Creator agent for [Company Name]

• Brand voice: [paste from your document]

• Task: Create 3 tweets based on this blog post: -

• Requirements: Each tweet must be under 280 characters, include a call-to-action, and match our brand voice."

5. Add module → Slack → Post to #social-media-review channel

Step 5: Supervise and Refine

For the first week, your only job is to review the drafts. Whether they are good and on-brand. If not, go back to your brand voice document (Step 3) and your prompt (Step 4) and make adjustments. Here’s a checklist to assist with refining your process:

• Does it sound like our brand? (Compare to your "good examples")

• Is it factually accurate?

• Does it have a clear call-to-action?

• Would you be comfortable posting this manually?

Set a specific threshold: "Aim for 8/10 drafts passing your review before moving to Step 6."

Include a troubleshooting guide:

• If posts are too formal: Add "conversational, approachable" to your voice document

• If posts miss the point: Improve your RSS feed or add article summaries to the prompt

• If posts sound generic: Add more specific examples of your best work

Step 6: Expand and Automate (Slowly!)

Once your Content Creator is reliable, you can start giving it more responsibility and add another agent to your workflow.

Add the Scheduler

Instead of sending drafts for approval, send them to a social media scheduling tool like Buffer or directly to the platform's draft folder. 

• Option A: Semi-automated (safer for beginners)

Send approved drafts to Buffer/Hootsuite as drafts, you log in, review, and click "publish". This keeps the human in the loop for the final quality check.

• Option B: Fully automated (requires confidence)

After human approval in Slack (via reaction emoji), automatically schedule the post.  Set up Make to watch for 👍 reaction, then push to Buffer with publish time and include a 30-minute delay before publishing to allow for last-minute cancellation.

Step 7: Add the Analyst

Create a second workflow that runs weekly. It should pull performance data for the posts your agent created, use an AI model like (GPT-5.2) to summarize the key findings on what worked and what didn't, and send this summary to you. 

1. Set up data collection

• Connect Make to your social media platform APIs (Twitter API, LinkedIn API, etc.)

• Pull metrics: impressions, engagement rate, clicks, comments

• Filter for only posts created by your agent (add a tracking hashtag like #AgentPost)

2. Analysis prompt template:

"You are a Social Media Analyst. Review this week's performance data:

   [Paste the metrics]

   Identify:

• Top 3 performing posts (and why they worked)

• Bottom 3 performing posts (and what went wrong)

• Patterns in timing, topic, or format

• One specific recommendation for next week

   Keep your analysis concise (under 300 words)."

3. Create a feedback loop

• Save the analyst's summary to a Google Doc labeled "Week of [date]"

• Each month, feed the last 4 weeks of summaries back to your Content Creator agent

• Update your prompt: "Based on recent performance data: [paste summary], adjust your content strategy."

• Check if content quality has declined

• Review any posts that needed human intervention (and why)

• Adjust agent responsibilities based on what's working

And that’s it! Your social media intern is ready for the wild. Good luck! 😃 

THIS WEEK'S PROMPT 🧠

Use this prompt with your preferred LLM to design an autonomous social media marketing agent for your business.

The Scenario: You are the Chief Marketing Officer. Your marketing team is stretched thin, spending 60% of their time on routine social media tasks (content creation, scheduling, posting, and community management). Your CEO has asked you to explore using autonomous AI agents to automate these tasks, so your team can focus on strategy and creative direction.

The Prompt:

"You are an Autonomous Marketing Agent Architect. I need your help designing a comprehensive autonomous social media marketing system for my company. Our goal is to automate routine social media tasks while maintaining brand consistency and quality."

Current Situation:

• We operate in the […] space (specifically: [your industry])

• We have social media presence on: [list your platforms]

• Our current team spends approximately 60% of its time on routine social media tasks

• We have customer data in [your CRM], analytics in [your analytics platform], and content in [your CMS]

• Our brand voice is: [describe your brand voice]

• Our target audience is: [describe your target audience]

• Our key messaging pillars are: [list your key messages]

Questions:

1. Agent Architecture Design

Based on our situation, what would be the optimal multi-agent system architecture for our company? Which specialized agents would we need, and what would be their specific responsibilities?

2. Content Generation Strategy

How should we structure the Content Generation Agent to create social media content that maintains our brand voice while adapting to platform-specific requirements? What training data or guidelines should we provide?

3. Quality Control Framework

What compliance and brand safety checks should the Compliance Agent perform before content is published? How do we prevent tone-deaf or culturally insensitive content?

4. Integration Requirements

What systems does our autonomous agent need to integrate with? What data flows should we establish between our agent and our existing tools?

5. Escalation Protocols

What types of situations should trigger escalation to human team members? How should we design the system to handle edge cases and novel situations?

6. Performance Metrics

What metrics should we track to measure the effectiveness of our autonomous social media marketing agent? How should we define success?

7. Implementation Roadmap

What would a phased implementation look like? Should we start with one agent and build up, or implement the full system at once? What's the timeline?

For each question, provide specific, actionable recommendations tailored to our business context.

TOOLS WE USE ⚒️

These are AI tools we use at Rise Up Media. If you're not using them already, they're worth a look.

• Claude Cowork: Claude Code but for non-devs (like us)

• Manus AI: General-purpose AI agent we love (and use to create this newsletter)

• n8n: Open-source automation (if you like that sort of thing)

• Relevance AI: No-code create-your-own AI agents platform

• OpusClip: Auto-clips long videos into shorts (and is really good at it)

Full disclosure: some links above are affiliate links. If you sign up, we’ll earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

HAVING FUN WITH AI 😊

The past couple of days have been AI-ntertaining thanks to Anthropic's new ads trolling OpenAI’s new ad integration. If you haven’t seen them yet, here they are:

Bonus points to Anthropic for securing rights to a Dr. Dre song for their campaign. 😎

WRAPPING UP 🌯

This shift from "I tell the AI what to do" to "the AI just does it" is a big deal.

Like email automation for customer comms or programmatic buying for ads, autonomous agents can do the same thing for social media now.

The point isn't to replace your team. It's to give them their time back.

Let the agents handle the day-to-day posting, scheduling, and replying. Let your people do the thinking, the creative work, and the things that actually need a human brain.

Until next time, keep exploring the horizon. 🌅

Alex Lielacher

P.S. If you want your brand to show up in Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, reach out to my agency, Rise Up Media. That's what we do.