Step 1 (week 1): transfer the voice and record the baseline
Provide the brand guidelines, a set of posts the team is proud of, and a set it regrets, and review the Brand Brain the Social Growth Digital FTE builds from them: voice, vocabulary, topics the brand does not comment on, audiences that are protected. Correct every item now. Record the baseline from the accounts: posts per platform per week, replies handled, turnaround from a brand event to a post, and engagement where you can measure it.
Voice transfer is the pilot's foundation; a wrong register in memory produces a month of edits.
Step 2 (week 1–2): connect the accounts and write the reply rules
Connect each social account in Setup with scoped permissions per property, able to draft and schedule but not to publish until a class is promoted. Write the remit's reply rules: which comment categories escalate to a person every time, complaints, controversy, anything about a named individual, legal language, and which the FTE may draft replies for, such as questions with a documented answer. Set the cadence per platform at a level the brand can sustain.
The escalate list is fixed. Promotion later applies only to post categories, never to sensitive replies.
Step 3 (weeks 2–4): approve every post and reply, test deliberately
Posts arrive in Approvals as native drafts per platform, never the same text everywhere, with the calendar visible. Replies the rules allow arrive as drafts; the rest arrive as escalations with the thread. Approve, edit, or send back with a reason. In this cycle, deliberately test two or three formats per platform so the second cycle has something to read, and record which were tests.
Read the send-back reasons weekly. Register edits become Brand Brain rules; a reply that should have escalated adds a category to the list the same day.
- Post drafts: native per platform, calendar visible, gated
- Reply drafts: only for categories the rules allow
- Escalations: complaints, controversy, named individuals, with the thread
- Tests: two or three formats per platform, labelled
Step 4 (first review, day ~30): tune and promote nothing
At the first review, read the FTE's report: posts approved and published per platform, replies drafted and escalated, approval rate per category with reasons, and engagement where measured, with the rest marked unmeasured. Tune the Brand Brain and the reply rules. Promote nothing; a first cycle with tests in it is not a record.
Write the review note.
Step 5 (weeks 5–8): the cadence settles and the tests are read
In the second cycle the calendar settles into what the first cycle's results support, the send-backs are few and about tone, and the manager's approval time is minutes a day. Read the test results honestly: a format that did nothing is dropped, one that worked becomes part of the cadence. Escalations continue to reach the person who handles them with the thread attached.
The community diagnostic mission, asking why engagement moved, is worth running once here for ranked hypotheses from the accounts' own data.
Step 6 (second review, day ~60): the auto-publish decision
At the second review, compare against the baseline on the same measures, then decide whether any routine post category has earned auto-publish within bounds, such as scheduled educational posts only, from a long clean record. Many brands decide not to, and the FTE's value is unchanged; the choice is the brand's. Sensitive replies are not a candidate at any review.
Log the decision and revisit the reply rules, because the categories that arrived as escalations in two cycles tell you what the audience actually brings.
What does done look like at day 60?
Done is a presence that is native on each platform, consistent in voice because the voice lives in memory rather than in a person's head, replies that reach a person when they should, a cadence the brand can sustain, tests read honestly, and a promotion decision made from the record or deliberately declined. The marketing lead spent minutes a day and an hour a month, and the accounts have a memory that survives staff changes.
It is not a viral machine, and the performance view will say so where it cannot measure reach; what it is, is owned.