Your social media

It starts without being asked

You pick a day and an hour — once a week, or once a day. At that time Mark sits down and writes the next batch: what to say, where it goes, and when. You get one message with the lot, and the week is planned before you have thought about it.

That appointment is when Mark writes, never when anything publishes. The two get confused often enough to be worth saying plainly: nothing leaves on a timer. The posts inside a batch are spread across the days, because a week’s worth arriving at once reads as a machine, and every one of them is a real entry you can move or cancel.

Approving is one word

Reply yes and the batch is scheduled. Or take them one at a time: change a sentence, ask for a different picture, drop one you do not want. Anything you would rather do on a screen — reading the week laid out, editing a draft properly, deleting several — is on your calendar in the web app, and it is the same drafts either way.

Nothing publishes without that approval. It is not a preference you could turn off by accident: the approval is recorded on the server, and the part of the system that schedules a post refuses anything that has not got one. Mark cannot write itself the permission.

Each account gets what suits it

A post is not one piece of text sprayed everywhere. Every network has its own rules about length, links and pictures, and Mark writes to them rather than truncating at the end — the version that lands on each account is one written for that account.

Three ways a picture happens

Send nothing and Mark makes one for that post. Send a photograph and it uses yours, untouched, because a real photograph of your own shop beats anything generated. Send a photograph with a note — use this but add a coffee cup on the side — and it works on the one you sent.

No stock library, ever. A stock photograph of a bakery is a photograph of somebody else’s bakery, and your customers can tell. The picture is made for the post it belongs to or it is one you took.

It asks before it spends

Pictures cost money to make, so when Mark is working unattended it does what you told it to: make one, or ask first. It never quietly generates a row of options for you to browse — that is spending on work nobody asked for, and the answer to "which of these six" is usually "none".

Learned from what you already wrote

With your permission, Mark reads the posts you have published before and works out how you write — sentence length, what you never say, whether you use exclamation marks. It fills in a short profile, and you get to read and change it before it is used. If you would rather not hand over the old posts, skip it and just tell Mark instead.

Nothing it guesses goes into that profile silently. The profile is yours: you can edit it, and you can withdraw it.

And from every correction

When you rewrite a draft before approving it, the difference between what Mark wrote and what you sent is the most useful thing it will see all week. It keeps it, and the next batch is closer.