What is social-media-skills?
social-media-skills, by Charlie Hills, who writes the MarTech AI newsletter on Substack, is a pack of 17 Agent Skills (SKILL.md workflow files) for Claude and Codex. A voice-builder skill interviews you and analyses 3 to 5 writing samples to produce about-me.md and voice.md, which the other skills read before drafting. Most of the rest are LinkedIn tools: post writing, hooks, formatting frameworks, a profile rebuild, a post scorer, topic research and an analytics dashboard built from LinkedIn's own export. The others cover Instagram Reel scripts, YouTube thumbnail prompts, pinned comments and image prompts for Gemini.
It writes and reviews; it does not publish. There is no scheduling, no posting through platform APIs and no browser automation that posts, and the README says saving a draft does not publish it. TikTok is not covered, and X appears only as a feed the research skill reads. Two optional routes call paid services with your own keys: Apify to fetch LinkedIn post history or an Instagram Reel, and Gemini 2.5 Flash to analyse the Reel video.
The repo is MIT-licensed, created in April 2026, with about 4,480 GitHub stars and 989 forks, a higher fork share than most skill packs. There are no GitHub releases; VERSIONS.md lists 1.1.0 (15 September 2026), which added Codex support, and the last commit was on 18 October 2026. GitHub labels it Python because of one test script; the skills themselves are Markdown.
Is social-media-skills worth it?
social-media-skills is more disciplined than the star count would suggest. Each of the 17 skills is a full workflow rather than a one-line prompt: post-scorer weights comments three times reactions, compares a draft with your top 10% of posts and refuses to fill its scorecard with invented numbers when it has no history; reels-scripting runs a QA pass with a 95 out of 100 gate and reports blockers rather than inflating the score. The September rewrite added explicit rules that the agent must never inherit the maintainer's identity or accounts, never claim an image was checked unless it was opened, and never treat drafting as permission to publish.
The voice files are the useful core. voice-builder turns a six-question interview and your samples into a profile that records what you never do as well as what you do, and the drafting skills read it every time. The catch is that the author's own rules sit on top of yours. post-writer bans em dashes outright, defaults to British English and keeps posts between 150 and 300 words; reels-scripting forbids opening with "I" and caps a Reel at two points. Those are sensible LinkedIn habits, but they are one creator's habits, and you will edit SKILL.md files to remove them.
The paid routes carry the real risk. Fetching your post history uses the Apify actor apimaestro/linkedin-profile-posts at $0.005 per post, so 100 posts cost about $0.50, and Reel analysis uses Apify's Instagram scraper plus Gemini 2.5 Flash at $0.30 per million input tokens. LinkedIn's User Agreement prohibits scripts or crawlers that scrape profiles and data, and Instagram's terms bar automated collection without permission; niche-research also tells the agent to scroll the X home feed, and X's terms call crawling or scraping without written consent expressly prohibited. The skills limit collection to post bodies and counts and forbid scraping comments, which narrows the exposure without removing it. Uploading your own LinkedIn Analytics export, which analytics-dashboard does, avoids it.
The repo is also a shop window. The README and plugin manifest point to the MarTech AI Substack, where most recent issues are for paid subscribers, and the about page invites readers to a waitlist for help building a LinkedIn presence. The README says this is not the complete private system behind the author's accounts, which it puts at 350,000 followers. Nothing in the repo is gated, and the skills work without the newsletter, but the image skills stop at a Gemini prompt rather than the Figma pipeline the author uses. Open pull requests include unmerged proposals for publishing skills and several off-topic submissions, and the project is one person's work.
Where it earns its place
A solo B2B consultant posting on LinkedIn three times a week
Draft posts that sound like me from meeting notes and transcripts
Run voice-builder once with five past posts, then hand post-writer a context dump; it offers three angles, drafts in a code block and saves the approved version. No API costs beyond the Claude or Codex plan.
A head of marketing at a 30-person agency reviewing LinkedIn results monthly
Turn our LinkedIn Analytics export into a dashboard and a short list of what to post next
Upload the xlsx export to analytics-dashboard, which builds a React and Recharts dashboard with a day-of-week heatmap and five recommendations, labelling projections as extrapolations. Uses LinkedIn's own export, so no scraping.
A developer setting up a shared Codex project for a two-person content team
Install a consistent set of writing skills without overwriting anyone's custom copies
Copy the skills into .agents/skills with the README's loop, which preserves existing folders, then run python3 tests/test-codex-portability.py --codex. Updates are manual: the loop is not an updater.
Before you commit
- Setup
- In Claude Code, /plugin marketplace add charlie947/social-media-skills then /plugin install social-media-skills; in Codex, the skill installer or a copy into .agents/skills; in Claude Desktop, zip and upload one skill folder at a time. Run voice-builder first for personalised work.
- Integrations
- Optional Apify (APIFY_API_TOKEN) for LinkedIn post history and Instagram Reels, Gemini 2.5 Flash (GOOGLE_AI_API_KEY) with Node 18+ for video analysis, a Notion connector for reference links, and whatever web search or browser tools the agent already has. Image skills output prompts to paste into Gemini.
- Data and privacy
- Voice files and outputs stay in your project folder; drafts go to your agent's model provider. Apify runs collect public post bodies and counts, and Gemini's free API tier lets Google use inputs to improve its products. MIT licence; no security advisories published.
- Cost at scale
- No paid edition. Apify's Free plan includes $5 of monthly credit and Starter is $19 a month; LinkedIn history costs about $0.50 per 100 posts and each Reel scrape about $0.0026 on the Free tier, plus Gemini tokens at $2.50 per million output.
- Limits
- 17 open issues and pull requests, several off-topic; no GitHub releases, so installed copies must be updated by hand; image skills stop at prompts unless you have Gemini image access; LinkedIn Analytics export formats are treated as examples, not a fixed schema.
What’s good
- Full workflows with explicit evidence and no-fabrication rules
- Voice profile records what you avoid as well as how you write
- Draft-only by design; never publishes or messages
- Works in Claude Code, Claude Desktop and Codex
What’s not
- Optional LinkedIn and Instagram scraping routes conflict with platform terms
- Author's style rules (no em dashes, 150 to 300 words) are hard-coded
- Heavily LinkedIn-focused; no TikTok, no posting or scheduling
- Single maintainer; doubles as a lead magnet for a paid newsletter
Best for
Founders, consultants and marketers who write their own LinkedIn posts with Claude or Codex and want drafts in their voice, not a publishing tool.
social-media-skills alternatives
social-media-skills: common questions
- Is social-media-skills worth it?
- A carefully written LinkedIn ghostwriting kit that knows its limits better than most, held back by one creator's house style and scraping routes LinkedIn's own terms forbid. We rate it 3.6 out of 5.
- How much does social-media-skills cost?
- Free and open source (MIT). Optional routes use your own Apify account (about $0.005 per LinkedIn post fetched) and Gemini API key.
- What are the downsides of social-media-skills?
- Optional LinkedIn and Instagram scraping routes conflict with platform terms; author's style rules (no em dashes, 150 to 300 words) are hard-coded; heavily LinkedIn-focused; no TikTok, no posting or scheduling; single maintainer; doubles as a lead magnet for a paid newsletter.
- Who is social-media-skills best for?
- Founders, consultants and marketers who write their own LinkedIn posts with Claude or Codex and want drafts in their voice, not a publishing tool.
- How much does social-media-skills cost for a team or in production?
- No paid edition. Apify's Free plan includes $5 of monthly credit and Starter is $19 a month; LinkedIn history costs about $0.50 per 100 posts and each Reel scrape about $0.0026 on the Free tier, plus Gemini tokens at $2.50 per million output.
- Is social-media-skills safe for company data?
- Voice files and outputs stay in your project folder; drafts go to your agent's model provider. Apify runs collect public post bodies and counts, and Gemini's free API tier lets Google use inputs to improve its products. MIT licence; no security advisories published.
- What are the best social-media-skills alternatives?
- The closest alternatives we have reviewed are Agent Reach and Anthropic Skills.
Answers checked Oct 31, 2026.