Claude Cowork for social media managers: 7 research workflows

Cowork is Claude for tasks rather than questions. Instead of answering one message, it plans the steps, runs them, and hands you the finished thing: a report, a table, a deck. Anthropic’s own examples are mostly office work, like expense reports and a Monday metrics readout.

For a social media manager the slow part of the week is research: reading the comments, watching the competitor’s videos, checking what a community argues about. Creative strategist Dara Denney uses Cowork for competitor and social reports and says it sometimes hits a wall on pages it can’t open. A connector that reads social media is what gets it past that wall. The steps above set it up in about five minutes, then each workflow below is one prompt.

Every workflow has a page in our recipes with the full prompt and a real run.

1. Mine a comment section

The questions, objections and phrases under a post are your next month of content.

Read the top 100 comments on <link to a YouTube video, TikTok, Reel, Reddit thread or X post>.
Give me the 10 questions people ask most, their objections, what they praise, and 10 exact
phrases I could reuse in a hook. Quote people's exact words with a link after each quote.

A real run on an r/socialmedia thread surfaced lines like “Creation got cheap, but trust got expensive.” See the recipe.

2. A weekly niche brief

One summary of the week’s top Reddit posts, the most liked X posts and the most viewed YouTube videos on your topic. It’s built to run every Monday as a scheduled task; the weekly brief guide shows how.

Build my weekly brief on "<your niche>" for the past 7 days from Reddit, X and YouTube: the 5
conversations that mattered, questions people keep asking, content that clearly worked, and 3
ideas I could post next week. Link every source.

See the recipe.

3. Voice of customer from Reddit

The pains people describe in their own words, in a table you can show a client.

Search Reddit for "<problem or product category>", top posts from the past year. Read the 5 most
discussed threads with their comments and build a table: pain, exact quote, how often it came up,
link.

See the recipe.

4. Check a subreddit before you post

Many subreddits remove self-promotion and one-line questions. Read the rules first.

Read the rules of r/<subreddit> and its top posts this month. Tell me what gets removed (quote the
rule), whether links are allowed, and what the top posts have in common. Then check my draft:
<draft>

See the recipe.

5. Competitor channel teardown

What a competitor’s most viewed YouTube videos have in common, from what they actually say.

List the last 50 uploads of <@channel> with their views. Read the full transcripts of the 3 most
viewed and tell me what they share: topics, title patterns, length, hook style.

See the recipe.

6. Short-form video teardown

The same for TikTok and Reels: why a creator’s most played videos work.

List <@handle>'s last 30 TikToks with their plays, skip pinned ones, and read the transcripts of
the 3 most played from the last 30 days. For each: the first sentence word for word, the hook type,
the structure and the call to action. Then compare them with the creator's typical video.

In a real run on @garyvee’s TikTok, the top three drew 9 to 31 times the median plays. See the recipe.

7. Hook research

A creator’s best opening lines, sorted by hook type.

Read <@handle>'s last 200 X posts ranked by engagement, take the top 20, and label each opening
line: question, bold claim, number, story, contrarian or how-to. Which types perform best?

See the recipe.

Make it run on its own

Any of these can become a scheduled task: open Scheduled in Cowork’s sidebar, click New task and paste the prompt with every blank filled in. Scheduled tasks run in the cloud, so they keep going when your laptop is shut. The weekly brief guide walks through it.