Not sure what an MCP server is or how it’s used? Check out my explainer here.
Buffer is a social media scheduler. You connect your accounts, fill a queue, and it posts to a timetable so you don’t have to be at a desk at 8am on a Tuesday. It also has an MCP server, which puts that queue inside the conversation where I’m already writing the posts.
I set up a company page a fortnight ago and needed content on it from a standing start. Eight posts, one per weekday. Ordinarily that’s an evening: write one, copy it, open the scheduler, paste, pick the channel, set the time, attach an image, go back, write the next one, lose your place, make coffee. I did all eight in one sitting without leaving the conversation.
The part I didn’t expect was what it did to revising. Rearranging a queue by hand is tedious enough that I’d let a mediocre post go out rather than reshuffle seven others around it. Moving one to Thursday is now a sentence, so I move it.
Two things nearly went out wrong, and both are the kind of thing nobody warns you about.
The first was link previews — the box with a picture and a headline that appears under a post when you share a link. Mine weren’t appearing. The posts published as bare URLs, which look cheap and get fewer clicks. I assumed the problem was on the website’s end, in the preview information a page publishes about itself for exactly this purpose, so I went and checked. It was correct. The actual cause is that Buffer wants the link attached to the post as a thing in its own right, and typing the address into the body of the post doesn’t count. There’s no warning. The post looks finished sitting in the queue and only reveals itself when it publishes.
The second was about who gets to press send. The page is co-owned with a collaborator, so I wanted posts to queue up and then wait for a human to release them. For that channel Buffer offers two settings: save as a draft, or publish automatically. There is no approval step in between. So the shared page runs draft-then-publish by hand, deliberately, and the automation stops one step short of the thing that matters. When somebody else’s name is on the page, “it went out automatically” isn’t a sentence I want to have to say to them.
Making it repeatable
The one-off version of this is just asking. I say something like:
Take these three posts, queue them on the company page for the next three weekday mornings, attach the link to each one as a proper link asset, and leave them as drafts rather than publishing.
That works. But I don’t want to remember those two gotchas every time, and in six weeks I won’t. So they live in a skill instead — and a skill here is nothing more exotic than a text file of instructions the assistant reads when the job comes up. You write it in plain English, not code. Mine says roughly this:
When queueing social posts to Buffer:
- Attach every link as a link asset. A URL typed into the post
body publishes with no preview card.
- The co-owned page is draft-only. Never schedule it to publish
automatically.
- One post per weekday, mornings, unless I say otherwise.
- Read the finished queue back to me with dates before you stop.Four lines of English, and every one of them is a mistake I already made. Written down once, they stop being things I have to catch. Anything that reads that file queues posts the way I would on a good day.
Every tool in this series works the same way: the MCP server lets an assistant act, and a short file of instructions tells it how you want that done.
The rest of what I use it for is smaller. There’s a place to put an idea that isn’t a post yet, which is where half-thoughts go instead of into a note I’ll never open again. And the performance figures come back through the same interface, so asking what actually landed last month is a question rather than an afternoon. I’ve scoped a searchable archive of my own old posts on top of that — the history and the numbers are both reachable — though I haven’t built it.
Buffer’s free plan connects three channels, which is enough to find out whether the habit survives contact with a real week. Mine now has eight posts going out, one per weekday, and I haven’t opened the Buffer website since the day I loaded them.