--- title: "The Content Plan & Post Prompts — Campaigns & Strategy" description: "How a plan row becomes individual posts with real proposed times — and why expansion never touches a week you have already laid out." canonical_url: "https://bolta.ai/university/courses/campaigns-and-strategy/the-content-plan-and-post-prompts" markdown_url: "https://bolta.ai/university/courses/campaigns-and-strategy/the-content-plan-and-post-prompts.md" last_updated: "2026-09-10" content_type: "feature" publisher: "Bolta" --- # The Content Plan & Post Prompts — Campaigns & Strategy Source: https://bolta.ai/university/courses/campaigns-and-strategy/the-content-plan-and-post-prompts Last updated: 2026-09-10 How a plan row becomes individual posts with real proposed times — and why expansion never touches a week you have already laid out. ## Summary Lesson from the Bolta University course "Campaigns & Strategy". The full lesson text follows. ## Who this is for - Founders - Creators - Marketing teams - Agencies ## Limitations and boundaries - Course material describes the product and the platforms at the time of writing; verify current behaviour in the app. - Social network features, limits, and algorithms change independently of Bolta. - Current prices and plan limits must be verified on the Bolta pricing page. ## Lesson 1: Plan Rows The content plan is the campaign's real planning object. The content mix you see as "3 images, 1 carousel" is a **projection** of it — each format's counts summed across the rows that name it. Each row says four things: - **Format** — one key from the registry in Module 8. - **Count** — how many of that format, per week. - **Accounts** — which social accounts this row targets. Empty means "inherit the campaign's accounts", which is what you want most of the time. - **Days** — which days of the week this row's posts may land on. Empty means "any day", which in practice means spread across weekdays. Per-row accounts **narrow** the campaign's targeting; they never widen it. That is how you build a plan like "four image posts everywhere, one carousel on Instagram only" without splitting it into two campaigns. The days field is the underused one. A row with no days is spread Monday to Friday. If you have a business where the weekend is the point — a restaurant, a gym, an events venue — naming the days is the difference between content that lands when people act and content that lands when the office is open. ## Lesson 2: Expansion Into Post Prompts A plan is a shape. A **post prompt** is one row of that shape made concrete: this post, this format, these accounts, this time. Expansion turns the first into the second, and the prompts are visible and editable on the campaign's detail page before anything is written. Expansion answers exactly two questions. **Which weeks?** Every week of the window that has not already been generated and that has no prompts yet. **Never a week that already has them.** Not to add, not to remove, not to re-time. If you deleted four prompts from week three, you did that on purpose, and an expansion that helpfully put them back would be the software arguing with the person using it. The practical consequence — and this is the surprise people hit — is that **changing the plan changes the weeks that have not been laid out yet.** Week one may already be written. That is also the only honest promise the system can make: it cannot retroactively unwrite content it has already produced. So: get the plan right before you activate, and expect plan edits mid-campaign to take effect from the next unexpanded week onward. ## Lesson 3: Where the Times Come From Post prompts carry proposed times, and those times have real teeth — the draft saved for a prompt carries the prompt's time, and approving a draft keeps an existing future time rather than reallocating it. What you set here is what publishes. The time is chosen in this order: 1. **Your workspace's preferred schedule**, if you have set one. When a schedule carries any times at all, it is the authority for **both** the hours and which days are usable. A customer who configured Tuesday and Thursday said something, and spreading onto Monday because a plan row did not name days would be overruling them. 2. **9:00, 12:00, 15:00 and 17:00 local**, if you have not. These are the same four hours the approval allocator falls back to, so a campaign laid out in advance and a draft approved on the spot do not land at systematically different times. The layout is **deterministic**. Laying out week four does not depend on what happens to be in your calendar the moment somebody opens the page. Two people opening the same campaign see the same plan. One exception is worth knowing: if a prompt's date has already passed by the time the run fires, the allocator takes over rather than writing a publish time in the past. **If your campaign content lands at times you dislike, the fix is the workspace preferred schedule, not the individual prompts.** Editing prompts fixes one week; the schedule fixes every week and every routine as well. ## Lesson 4: Editing Prompts Without Fighting the System A short set of rules that keeps prompt editing predictable: **Edit before activation where you can.** Prompts for the first week are expanded early. Changes made before the first run is dispatched are free; changes made after apply from the next unexpanded week. **Deleting a prompt is a decision the system respects.** It will not come back on the next expansion. If you want it back, add it yourself. **Prompts are per post, plan rows are per week.** Do not try to express "one extra post this week only" by editing the plan — edit the prompts for that week. Do not try to express "one more image every week" by adding prompts — edit the plan row's count. **Times you set are promises the publisher keeps.** If you move a prompt to Saturday 08:00, that is when it goes out, provided it is approved in time. **Check the accounts on each row before you activate.** An account that names no valid connection is the single most common reason a campaign sits armed and generates nothing — the campaign will tell you so (Module 14), but it is easier to catch it here. ## Lesson 5: Three Plans, Worked Reading a plan as a table is easier than reading it as prose. Each of these is one week; multiply by the duration for the total. ### A single-platform starter | Format | Count | Accounts | Days | |-|-|-|-| | Image posts | 3 | inherit | — | Three images a week, spread Monday to Friday, on whatever the campaign targets. Nothing to get wrong. This is the right first plan for almost everybody. ### A cross-platform push with one narrowed row | Format | Count | Accounts | Days | |-|-|-|-| | Image posts | 3 | inherit | — | | Carousels | 1 | Instagram only | tue | The images go everywhere the campaign targets. The carousel goes only where a carousel is worth making, on a fixed day so it always lands mid-week. This is the pattern that stops you paying for decks on platforms that render them badly. ### A weekend-facing local business | Format | Count | Accounts | Days | |-|-|-|-| | Image posts | 2 | inherit | thu, fri | | Text posts | 1 | inherit | sat | Named days, because for this business the weekend is the point. Without the days field all three would spread across Monday to Friday — which is the default, and would be wrong here. ### Reading a plan for problems Before activating, check four things: 1. **Multiply.** Count × weeks. Is that a number you will read? 2. **Narrowing.** Does any row target a platform where that format works badly? 3. **Days.** Is the default weekday spread right for this business? 4. **Accounts.** Is every account in every row actually connected? ## What to take away - The plan is rows of format, count, accounts and days; the mix is a summary of it. - Empty accounts inherit the campaign; empty days spread across weekdays. - Expansion fills only weeks that have no prompts — it never rewrites a week you have touched. - Times come from your preferred schedule, or 9/12/15/17, deterministically — and they are what actually publishes. ## Relevant links - [Bolta University](https://bolta.ai/university) - [Campaigns & Strategy](https://bolta.ai/university/courses/campaigns-and-strategy) - [Bolta pricing](https://bolta.ai/pricing)