How to Set Up OpenClaw for Content Creation (Step-by-Step)

OpenClaw can automate your entire content workflow — from researching trending topics to writing drafts in your voice to scheduling posts across platforms. The setup takes about 30 minutes if you know what you're doing, and the result is an agent that wakes up every morning with your content calendar ready.

This isn't theoretical. The CAIO published a full guide on OpenClaw social media automation. Mixpost just launched an official ClawHub skill for social scheduling. And openclaw-ai.online has step-by-step content creation tutorials. Here's the practical version — what actually works.

What the End Result Looks Like

Imagine this: every morning at 8 AM, you get a Telegram message from your agent:

"Here's your content for today. 3 X posts (scheduled for 10am, 2pm, 6pm), 1 newsletter draft, and a LinkedIn post based on that Hacker News article about supply chain security. Review and approve when ready."

That's not hypothetical. People are running this right now. The CAIO's guide describes the exact same pattern: "Every morning, OpenClaw generates a batch of posts for your review, then schedules approved ones throughout the day."

The Building Blocks

1. Research Pipeline

Your agent needs sources. Configure it to monitor:

• RSS feeds / News sites — Use web_fetch to pull from Hacker News, The Register, TechCrunch, or any site with an RSS feed
• X/Twitter bookmarks — Save interesting posts throughout the day, agent processes them overnight
• Reddit — Monitor subreddits via JSON endpoints (old.reddit.com/r/your_sub/.json) — no login needed
• YouTube transcripts — Use the summarize skill to extract key points from videos

Set up a cron job that runs this research daily:

openclaw cron add \
  --name "Content Research" \
  --cron "0 7 * * *" \
  --tz "Europe/Berlin" \
  --session isolated \
  --message "Scan content sources, identify 5 trending topics, save to content-ideas/" \
  --announce \
  --channel telegram \
  --to "YOUR_CHAT_ID"

2. Brand Voice Profile

This is the secret sauce. In your SOUL.md, define your writing style:

## Writing Style
- Conversational but authoritative
- Use concrete numbers and examples
- Short paragraphs, punchy sentences
- Humor is allowed — especially sarcasm
- Never start with "In today's rapidly evolving..."
- Reference personal experience when relevant

The better you define this, the less editing you'll do on the output. Spend time on this. Feed it 10 of your best posts as examples in a content-voice/examples/ folder.

3. Social Media Scheduling

Two approaches:

Option A: Mixpost skill (recommended)

clawhub install mixpost

Mixpost is a self-hosted social media scheduler. The official OpenClaw skill lets you manage posts through conversational commands: "Schedule this post for Tuesday at 2 PM across Twitter and LinkedIn." Your data stays on your infrastructure.

Option B: Browser automation For platforms without API access (or when you want to use your logged-in account), OpenClaw's browser skill can post directly. It navigates to the platform, fills in your post, and publishes — just like you would manually.

4. Content Generation Templates

Different platforms need different formats. Define templates in your agent's context:

X/Twitter: Hook → Insight → Punch line. 1-3 sentences max.

LinkedIn: Provocative opening → Story → Lesson → Question. 150-300 words.

Newsletter: Observation → Deep analysis → Actionable takeaway. 800-1200 words.

Blog/SEO: Answer the question immediately → Detailed guide → CTA. 1000-2000 words.

5. The Review Loop (Critical)

Here's the non-negotiable rule: never auto-publish without review (at least in the beginning).

As openclaw-ai.online's tutorial notes: "Social media automation works best when combined with human oversight."

Your agent generates drafts and sends them to you via Telegram:

🗓️ Content for Monday, Feb 24:

📱 X Posts (3):
1. "Most people overthink their tech stack..."
2. "Unpopular opinion: the best documentation..."  
3. "I automated my entire content calendar..."

💼 LinkedIn:
"Last week I shipped a feature that took 20 minutes..."

✅ Approve all | ✏️ Edit | ❌ Reject

After 2-3 weeks of reviewing, you'll trust the output enough to auto-publish certain categories.

The Full Cron Setup

A complete content machine uses 3 cron jobs:

7 AM  — Research: scan sources, save ideas
8 AM  — Generate: create daily drafts, send for review
6 PM  — Report: check today's post performance, save metrics

Each runs in an isolated session with announce delivery to Telegram. Total API cost: ~$1-2/day on Claude Sonnet.

Time Saved

Common Mistakes

1. No brand voice file — Without clear style guidelines, the output sounds like generic AI slop
2. Too many platforms at once — Start with one, nail it, then expand
3. No review step — AI-generated content without human review gets detected and ignored
4. Ignoring performance data — Set up tracking so your agent learns what resonates

Skip the Setup

Configuring all of this from scratch takes a weekend: API keys, cron jobs, Mixpost, browser profiles, skill installation, voice tuning. If you want the content machine running today, Lobsterlair lets you deploy a pre-configured content creation agent in minutes.

Pick the Content Creator persona, paste in 5 examples of your writing style, connect your Telegram — and you're live. Because the real flex isn't creating content manually for 12 hours a week. It's reviewing AI-generated drafts over coffee for 15 minutes a day.