Launch window mechanics

Feeds do not distribute a post. They test it. A small slice of the audience sees it first, the system scores the reaction over the following half hour, and distribution either widens or stops. Almost everything written about creator marketing ends at publish. The reach was decided after that.

The job in this window is narrow: produce enough real, fast, high-quality reaction inside the test to clear the threshold, then decide whether the result deserves paid spend behind it.

Produces: a pre-publish setup, a timed sequence from thirty minutes before to two hours after, a go/no-go call on amplification with stop conditions, and a debrief that feeds the next cycle.

Before the post exists

The window cannot be worked if the post was not built to be worked. Three things are decided at draft time, not at publish time.

The post must create an obligation to respond. A neutral summary earns scrolling. A stated position, an open question, or a claim someone would want to correct earns replies, and replies are what the ranker weighs. This is not a call for provocation. It is the difference between "here is what we shipped" and "most teams are still doing this the slow way, here is the number that changed our mind."

Rights and attribution are contractual, not operational. The creator agreement must grant paid usage rights on the post itself, with a stated window. Without that clause, the post you spend six hours validating cannot be amplified, and renegotiating mid-window costs both time and leverage. This is the most common preventable failure in the sequence. Attribution goes in at the same time: a distinct tracking parameter or code per creator, and where links are not permitted, a read on branded-search lift instead.

The traffic needs somewhere to land. Reach is the entry, retention is the business. A spike arriving at a page with no next step is a spike that churns. Decide the destination before creating the demand: a signup path, a template, a resource, a community.

Choosing who to run this with: references/creator-scorecard.md.

Interaction leverage

Reactions are not worth the same, and the gaps between them are much larger than most teams assume. Ordered by leverage, strongest first:

Signal	Why it scores	What it means operationally
Author replying to each commenter	Evidence of a live conversation rather than a broadcast	The highest-value action available, by a wide margin. Sit in the comments and answer individually
Substantive replies from others	Costs real effort, therefore hard to fake	Build the tension or open question into the post so that replying is the natural response
Reshares carrying added commentary	Redistributes into a graph the post could not otherwise reach	Line up two or three people who will add a genuine opinion, not agreement
Saves and bookmarks	The silent endorsement, and a strong quality proxy	Lists, data, and frameworks earn these; opinion posts rarely do
Profile clicks	The post made someone curious about the author	A byproduct of a clear point of view, not something to engineer
Likes	The weakest signal on offer	Likes with no replies is a recognised low-quality pattern
Hides, mutes, reports	Strongly negative, and suppressive	Exactly what purchased engagement produces

Two structural constraints apply nearly everywhere. Outbound links in the post body suppress distribution, so the link goes in the first comment. Verified accounts receive materially wider reach than unverified ones, which makes verification a cost of entry rather than an upgrade.

Weightings, thresholds, and per-surface differences: references/platform-signals.md.

The sequence

When	Action
T−30	Publish into the hours the target audience actually reads, not the hours convenient for the team. Draft the first comment carrying the link. Write three to five seed questions that would each pull a second person into the thread. Tell the people who genuinely care that it is about to go up
T+0–15	Post the link comment immediately. The author answers every comment as it lands, individually, in substance. Target roughly ten substantive reactions inside fifteen minutes. This block clears the first threshold or it does not
T+15–60	The author keeps replying and extends threads rather than closing them with thanks. Reshares with commentary land here. Post a second question to restart the conversation once the first wave settles
T+60–120	Keep replying. Check the amplification trigger. Cross-post to a second surface for a second pulse rather than a duplicate
T+6–8h	The amplification decision resolves. Trigger met and sentiment positive, deploy. Otherwise let it run
T+2d	Publish the process teardown: how it was actually made, what it cost, what broke. Reliably produces a second wave, and it is planned in the original brief rather than improvised
T+3–7d	Publish the method or template and the getting-started path, so viewers become participants

Never edit the original after publish. Never post and leave.

Amplification: only behind proven winners

Paid spend does not rescue a weak post. It widens one that organic distribution already validated. The post itself is boosted so it stays native, rather than rebuilt as an ad, which discards the social proof that made it work in the first place.

Trigger. Engagement reaches roughly 1.5 to 2x the account's own trailing baseline, within six to eight hours of publish, with sentiment clearly positive. The baseline is that account's own recent performance, never a cross-industry benchmark, because a strong post on a small account and a weak post on a large one produce identical absolute numbers.

Stop. Cut on any one of these, not on all: cost per action running thirty percent over target for two consecutive days; frequency climbing while click-through declines; organic engagement on the original falling below its own baseline; a cluster of brand-safety-negative comments.

A trigger stated in numbers is what separates a decision from a habit. Without one, spend goes behind whatever the team happens to like.

Four-layer model, budget caps, test design, and a worked example: references/amplification.md.

Pre-publish check

• The post carries a clear interaction trigger, an open question or a stated position, not a neutral summary
• Zero outbound links in the body; link drafted and ready for the first comment
• No more than two hashtags
• The publishing account is verified
• Publish time matches when this audience actually reads
• Three to five seed questions written; the people who care have been told it is coming
• Paid usage rights confirmed in the creator agreement, with a stated window
• Attribution wired: distinct parameter or code per creator, branded-search read where links are disallowed
• The destination exists: signup path, template, or resource
• The author has the first hour blocked out and is not in meetings

What good looks like

• Reshare speed is the call, not like count. When reshares start outrunning likes, the post has crossed from something people consume to something people forward. That crossing is the earliest reliable read, and it appears well before the totals look impressive.
• Read who reacted before how many. Twenty substantive replies from an adjacent community beat two hundred likes from anywhere, and engagement from the wrong audience scores against the post rather than for it. If nobody from the target buying group is in the first wave, more volume will not repair it.
• Likes with no replies is a failure state, not a modest success. It is the exact pattern a ranker treats as low quality, and it is what purchased engagement produces.
• Sentiment is a gate, not a footnote. Positive above roughly eighty percent, negative below five. Attention carrying a negative split costs more than it returns, and amplifying it buys a larger argument.
• Reach is the entry, retention is the business. A spike that lands nowhere is a spike that churns.
• The three failures, in order of frequency: publishing and walking away; buying engagement; and putting spend behind a post that never cleared its own organic baseline.
• Scoring differs by motion. High-volume consumer runs on hit rate across many posts. A small-roster motion cannot, because the denominator is too small for the ratio to mean anything and the payoff is lagged pipeline rather than views. See references/consumer-ai.md.
• Review cadence, metrics, and the trap list: references/debrief.md.

Rules

• MUST have the author personally answer comments through the first hour. Nothing else in this skill compensates for skipping it.
• MUST use only real people on their own accounts, reacting because they have something to say. Coordinated pods, reciprocal-engagement groups, and purchased engagement are excluded, on quality grounds as much as ethical ones: they generate the exact low-quality pattern the ranker penalises.
• MUST confirm paid usage rights before publish, or the validated winner cannot be amplified.
• MUST set the amplification trigger and stop conditions in advance, in numbers.
• MUST disclose commercial relationships according to the applicable rules. Undisclosed sponsorship is a legal exposure and an audience one.
• NEVER put the link in the post body.
• NEVER boost a post that has not cleared its own organic baseline.
• NEVER edit the original after publish.
• NEVER give a creator material that performs far beyond what an ordinary user can reproduce. The gap becomes a credibility problem that outlasts the campaign.

Example prompts

The post goes live in an hour. Walk me through the setup.

Six hours in: engagement is 1.4x our average, sentiment is mixed. Boost or hold?

Our creator post got 900 likes and 4 comments. Is it working?

Score these three creators for a launch we need to work hard in the first hour.