The format registry: text, images, carousels, feed and short video, blog posts and emails — what is producible, what is greyed out with a reason, and what is written but never sent.
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A content type is a format, never a subject.
"Carousel" is a type. "Behind the scenes" is a theme, and it belongs in the campaign's theme field where the writer already reads it.
Keeping those apart is what makes a plan countable. "Three of five images made" is a real sentence you can check. "Three of five punchy problem posts" is not — nobody can tell whether a given draft is one.
This is why the vocabulary is a fixed registry rather than free text. Imagine a plan that read "Punchy problem post ×3, First person reflection ×2, List tip ×2, Community question ×1" — those are editorial angles, not formats. It would render beautifully and could never be redeemed: there is no generator for "First person reflection", and no two campaigns would even use the same words for the same thing.
The registry is enforced everywhere a mix is written, including when Bolta drafts one for you. A key outside it is dropped rather than stored, so the plan you see is always a plan that can be produced.
Listed in the order you should think about them: shortest commitment first.
| Format | What it is | Producible |
|---|---|---|
| Text posts | Words only — no image, no deck | Yes |
| Image posts | One post, one generated image | Yes |
| Carousels | A multi-slide deck that reads in order | Yes |
| Stories | A full-screen post that disappears after a day | No |
| Feed videos | A landscape or square video for the main feed | Yes |
| Short videos | A vertical short — Reels, Shorts, TikTok | Yes |
| Avatar videos | A talking-head read by a generated presenter | No |
| Blog posts | A long-form article published to your site | Yes, with WordPress |
| Emails | A written email to your list | Written, not sent |
The picker shows all nine. The ones Bolta cannot make are shown greyed with the reason rather than hidden, so you learn that a format exists and why it is closed rather than wondering whether you missed a setting.
Stories. Campaigns cannot make stories yet. There is no story mode in the draft-saving path, and the only story field in the product is set from per-post publishing details a campaign run never supplies. Post stories by hand for now.
Avatar videos. Bolta does not make them at all — not on the campaign path, not anywhere else. This is a format we do not have rather than one campaigns cannot reach.
The distinction between those two reasons is deliberate. "We can't make it from here" and "we don't have it" have different futures, and a stale "no" is a lie the next person has to disprove.
Three formats are producible but carry a real condition. Reading these before you plan a week saves the most common disappointment.
The one format routed per post. Each carousel draft is sent to the deck engine rather than the single-image pass.
Deck settings live per campaign, not per plan row — slide count, visual style, aspect ratio, continuity, and whether to use your brand. That is a runtime constraint, not a preference: the asset generation step is dispatched per post and identifies a deck by the format tag on the draft, so it has no way to route a per-row configuration back to the post it came from. One config per campaign is what the runtime can actually consume, and it mirrors how jobs work elsewhere.
If you want two visually different carousel styles, that is two campaigns.
Both video formats are real and both are routed per post, which matters for cost. A plan of "3 image posts + 1 feed video" generates one video and bills for one — the image step skips video posts, and the video step skips everything else.
Aspect ratio is threaded end to end: feed videos are 16:9, short videos are 9:16. Only those two are offered, because the model is chosen from style and duration and a square video would succeed or fail depending on which model got picked — a coin flip the caller does not make.
Gated on a connected WordPress site, and this gate is the honest one. The article lands in your Approve queue either way, but with nowhere to publish it, the piece you counted never reaches its destination.
Blog rows also dispatch a different producer from your social rows. That is the whole reason they are producible: long-form is research → outline → article → SEO metadata, with a deduplication pass against your existing posts. It is a different pipeline, not a longer draft. A campaign week sends its blog rows to the article producer and its social rows to the social producer — one run each.
The one format whose limitation is about delivery, not production. Bolta writes the email in your voice and puts it in the Approve queue. There is no list, no email-service connection, and no send path. A person copies it into whatever actually sends their mail.
The row says so on its face — "Bolta writes these. Sending them is still yours." — which is what stops somebody planning a week of emails and then hunting for the send button.
The registry says what Bolta can make. It does not say what will work where — that is your judgment, but there are defaults worth starting from.
| Platform | Leads with | Works well | Poor fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Images, carousels | Short video | Long text | |
| Images | Carousels, text | Short-form video | |
| X | Text | Images | Carousels |
| Threads | Text | Images | Carousels |
| Bluesky | Text | Images | Carousels |
| Text, carousels | Images | Short video | |
| Mastodon | Text | Images | Carousels |
Three practical rules that follow:
A text-only mix is fine on the text platforms and weak on the visual ones. If your campaign targets Instagram and plans four text posts, you have planned four weak posts.
Carousels are the highest-effort format and the most platform-specific. They earn their cost on Instagram and LinkedIn and largely waste it elsewhere. If your campaign spans both kinds of platform, use a per-row account narrowing (Module 9) so the carousel goes only where it lands.
Video is expensive per piece. It is routed and billed per post, so a mixed plan does not put a video on everything — but each one you plan is a real cost. One video a week in a four-week campaign is usually the right ceiling for a first campaign.
A rough starting point for one week, for a single operator:
| Campaign type | Suggested week |
|---|---|
| First campaign | 3 image posts |
| Standard push | 3 image posts, 1 carousel |
| Visual-led brand | 4 image posts |
| Text-led / B2B | 2 text posts, 1 carousel, 1 image |
| Launch with a site | 3 image posts, 1 blog post |
Remember this is per week (Module 7). Multiply before you commit.
Image generation happens in a companion pass after the caption is written, routed per post from the format tag. This means a freshly generated draft can appear in your queue for a short time with its caption and without its image yet. That is the pass still running, not a failure. If a draft is still image-less well after the run finished, that is worth reporting — a post badged "Image" that contains only prose is exactly the mismatch this pipeline exists to avoid.