How to Post to Social Media From Claude, Step by Step

Claude can write your posts, but it cannot publish them by itself: it has no access to your social accounts until you connect it to a tool that does. To post from Claude, connect it to a social media scheduler through MCP, an open standard for connecting AI applications to outside tools. For this we recommend PostWharf: Claude writes each network's version in the chat, nothing goes out until you approve it, and every post comes back with a delivery receipt, one row per network, from $15 a month per brand with unlimited channels.

How you connect depends on which Claude you use. On the web, desktop and mobile apps it is a custom connector, available on every plan including Free. In Claude Code it is one claude mcp add command, and Claude Code comes with Pro and higher plans. The six steps below go from an empty workspace to a post you can prove went live. Anthropic's and PostWharf's settings were read on their own pages on 16 October 2026; if a menu label has moved since, look for the nearest match.

New to Claude? Take our free short course Claude, Start to Finish first. Its opening lesson sets up your account and the control that decides whether your chats train the model, which is worth settling before Claude touches anything public.

What you need before you start

You need two accounts: Claude, on a plan that allows the route you want, and PostWharf, with the social accounts you post to already connected. Here is what each Claude plan allows.

Prices come from our Claude profile; which plans allow custom connectors comes from Anthropic's help article on custom connectors, read 16 October 2026. On Team and Enterprise, an Owner adds the connector for the whole organisation, and each member then connects it for themselves.

What Claude can and cannot do here

Without a connector, Claude is a writer and you are the publisher: it drafts, you copy each version into Instagram, LinkedIn or X by hand. Once PostWharf is connected, Claude gets nineteen tools. With them it can read your workspace and channels, check what each network accepts, upload media and write alt text, save drafts, schedule one post or a batch, edit or cancel queued posts, and read the delivery receipts.

Some limits stay. Claude can only publish where PostWharf publishes: Reddit, Discord, Snapchat and WordPress are on request there and cannot be connected yet. PostWharf's pages describe publishing, not analytics reports or a social inbox, so performance numbers and replies to comments need another tool. And a chat reply that says "posted" is not proof. The receipt is, which is why Step 6 exists.

Why we use PostWharf for this guide

Best for: posting from Claude to one brand or several, with each post held for your approval and a receipt for what went live.

PostWharf is a social media scheduler built around one composer and one queue. You write a caption and hashtags once, change them for any network that needs different wording, and publish now or at a set time. It publishes to 10 networks today: Instagram, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Threads, Pinterest, Bluesky and Telegram. Its MCP server works with Claude Code and other MCP clients, and it comes with every plan, along with a REST API, webhooks and a command-line tool called wharf.

Three things make it a good fit for posting from Claude. Posts drafted with an AI assistant wait for you; in PostWharf's words, "Nothing goes out until you approve it." Every post is checked again after it publishes and keeps a delivery receipt with one row per network. And it bills per workspace, which is one brand, with unlimited channels and no per-channel fee, so five Instagram accounts under one brand are still one workspace.

Where it falls short: there is no free plan, only a 7-day trial of Starter, and scheduled posts are capped each month. The four request-only networks above cannot be connected yet, and there are no analytics reports or social inbox on its pages.

Start a 7-day PostWharf trial to post from Claude with an approval step and a receipt for every post. The card is charged when the trial ends; cancel before then and you pay nothing.

Step 1: Connect your social accounts to a PostWharf workspace

Sign up, then create a workspace for the brand you post for. A workspace holds that brand's channels, drafts, queue and delivery history, kept apart from any other brand you run. Connect every account Claude should post to before you bring Claude in, so that when you ask which channels it can use in Step 3, the list is complete.

Step 2: Add PostWharf to Claude

Pick the route that matches the Claude you use. The first one covers the web and both apps.

Claude on the web, desktop or phone: add a custom connector

1. In PostWharf, open Agent & MCP, then Claude app, and copy the connect link.
2. In Claude, open Customize, then Connectors. Click + Add and choose Add custom connector.
3. Name it something you will recognise, such as PostWharf, paste the connect link as the server URL and click Continue.
4. PostWharf's instructions say to leave the OAuth fields empty, because the link itself is the credential. Click Add.

Treat the connect link like a password. PostWharf keeps it separate from your workspace key, and if it ever leaks you can replace it from the dashboard. On Team and Enterprise plans the path starts in Organization settings, then Connectors, Add, Custom and Web, and only an Owner can add it (on Enterprise, also anyone with a custom role that can manage libraries). Free accounts can add one custom connector, so on Free it has to be this one.

A connector added this way belongs to your Claude account and connects from Anthropic's side, so it appears in Claude Desktop and the mobile apps too, with nothing to install.

Claude Desktop: no config file needed

If you added the connector above, Claude Desktop already has it. The desktop app's configuration file is for a different case: MCP servers that run on your own computer. You open it from the app's Settings, under Developer, with Edit Config. It lives at ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json on a Mac and at %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json on Windows, and each local server sits under mcpServers with the command that starts it:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "server-name": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "package-name"]
    }
  }
}

The app reads changes only after you quit it completely and open it again, and servers set up in this file stay on that computer: they are not available in Claude on the web. PostWharf's server is hosted, so it goes in as a connector, not in this file.

Claude Code: one command

Claude Code, Anthropic's coding agent, comes with the Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans and connects to external tools through MCP. It signs in to PostWharf with a workspace API key rather than the connect link.

1. In PostWharf, open Settings, then API keys, and create a key. A key reaches one workspace only, so Claude Code can act for that brand and no other.
2. Keep the key in an environment variable rather than in a file your repository tracks, then add the server:

export POSTWHARF_KEY="your-workspace-key"
claude mcp add --transport http \
  wharf https://mcp.postwharf.com/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $POSTWHARF_KEY"

3. Run claude mcp list. The wharf server should show as Connected, and inside a session /mcp lists it with its tool count.

That command uses Claude Code's default scope, local, which keeps the server to you in the current project. Add --scope user to use it in every project. Avoid --scope project: it writes the server into a .mcp.json file shared with everyone on the project, which is no place for a key. If a build pipeline posts for you (PostWharf's own example is release notes going to X and LinkedIn once the build passes), give the pipeline its own key so you can revoke it without touching anything else.

Step 3: Switch it on and check what Claude can see

In Claude on the web and in the apps, connectors are turned on per conversation. Click the + at the lower left of the message box, open Connectors and switch PostWharf on. Then ask something that changes nothing:

Which PostWharf workspace are you connected to, what time zone does it schedule in, and which channels can you post to?

Claude answers from PostWharf's own tools: one returns the brand the connection reaches, its plan and its time zone, and another lists every connected channel with the health of its connection. If an account is missing, connect it in PostWharf now, before you ask for any posts.

Step 4: Ask for drafts, not posts

Give Claude the facts and the voice, and tell it to save drafts. For example:

Our bakery now opens on Sundays, 9am to 2pm, starting this weekend.
Write a post for Instagram, a longer one for Facebook and a short one for X.
Warm and plain, no exclamation marks, one emoji at most.
Save all three as drafts in PostWharf. Do not schedule or publish anything.

Claude saves each version with PostWharf's draft tool, which writes the post and leaves it for a person to approve, and drafts do not count against your monthly scheduled posts until they go out. Claude can also look up what each network accepts (text limits, image shapes, file counts) and keep each version inside them. For a picture, PostWharf hands Claude an upload address for a file it has just made, or registers an image you already host, and Claude can write its alt text.

To turn an article you have already published into a batch of drafts, use the prompts from our guide to turning one blog post into five social posts, then ask Claude to save the results as PostWharf drafts.

Step 5: Approve, then publish or schedule

Read every draft before it goes anywhere: the facts (dates, prices, names), the tone and any links. You can review them in PostWharf, or ask Claude to list the drafts and fix one, for example "shorten the Facebook draft and put the opening hours in the first line". When a draft is right, release it:

Publish the Instagram draft now. Schedule the Facebook draft for Saturday at 8am and the X draft for Sunday at 9am.

Times follow the workspace's time zone, which is why Step 3 asked for it. For a longer plan, PostWharf can take a whole month of a calendar in one call. PostWharf's Claude page notes that Claude shows you each post before it queues it, and suggests keeping that pause even once you trust the setup. Until a post starts publishing you can still edit it or pull it from the queue; after that, PostWharf refuses edits.

Step 6: Check the delivery receipt

Ask Claude "did Sunday's posts go out?" and it reads the answer from PostWharf instead of guessing. The status tool returns the delivery state, the post's link and any error text, and a separate feed lists the receipts as they arrive. Each post is checked again after publishing, with one row per network, and failed deliveries retry on their own. The receipt also records it if a network removes a post afterwards, something a chat reply could never tell you.

Other schedulers that connect to Claude

PostWharf is our pick for posting from Claude with an approval step, across one brand or many. If your need is different (plans and prices as each vendor's own pages showed them on 16 October 2026):

• A free start on a few channels: Buffer includes its MCP server on every plan, Free among them. Free covers up to 3 channels with 10 scheduled posts per channel at a time, and paid plans start at $6 per channel a month. Buffer's own guide adds it as a custom connector at mcp.buffer.com/mcp, followed by a Buffer sign-in, so on Claude Free it takes the plan's single custom connector slot.
• Scheduling and analytics in one conversation: Metricool's MCP server is on every plan, including Free, which covers one brand and 20 scheduled posts a month but leaves out LinkedIn and X.
• Your own server: Postiz is open source and free to self-host. Hosted plans start at $29 a month ($23 billed yearly) for 5 channels, with the MCP server, CLI and API on every plan.

If you would rather posts go out from an automation than from a chat, PostWharf also lists n8n, Zapier and Make among the tools it works with. Our n8n workflow in which Claude captions each new blog post for your social queue shows that pattern.

If something goes wrong

• Claude says it has no PostWharf tools. The connector is switched off for this conversation. Turn it on from + and Connectors.
• claude mcp list shows Failed to connect. Check that POSTWHARF_KEY held your key when you ran claude mcp add. If it was empty, run claude mcp remove wharf and add the server again with the variable set.
• Claude can reach one brand but not another. Each key or connect link reaches a single workspace, and a key for one brand can never publish to another. Add one connection per brand and name each after its brand.
• A channel stopped publishing. Ask Claude to list your channels: the list shows the health of each connection. Reconnect the account in PostWharf if its connection has lapsed.
• Claude reports a 429 error. PostWharf is asking it to back off, and the response says how long to wait. PostWharf publishes no per-key rate limit; it queues posts against each network's own limits.
• The connect link was shared by mistake. Replace it from the PostWharf dashboard, then put the new link in the connector.

The short version

Claude writes; a scheduler posts. Connect PostWharf as a custom connector in Claude on any plan, or with claude mcp add in Claude Code on Pro and up. Check what Claude can see, ask for drafts, approve them, then read the receipt. For posting from Claude with an approval step and proof of what went live, PostWharf starts at $15 a month per brand. Buffer suits a free start, Metricool puts scheduling and analytics together, and Postiz runs on your own server.

Want better drafts from Claude in the first place? Start learning with our free AI courses for work.