Social media & outreach

GATE's social system (called Social Engagement) is your bot's full control surface for two kinds of work on social platforms: content — generating images and video, writing captions, and publishing posts — and outreach automation — running campaigns that discover leads, screen them, and act on them with likes, comments, follows, and DMs.

This is a first-party GATE product, not one of the provider-proxied integrations. It has its own browser-driven account sign-in (not the dashboard "connect your accounts" flow), and it handles posting and outreach on your behalf using that direct account access. Because it logs into your accounts with a real browser session, the system is heavily rate-limited to keep those accounts safe.

What works on which platform

The platform boundary is firm:

Facebook is content/posting only — no profile reads, no lead screening, no outreach. Don't expect your bot to run Facebook campaigns.

Video publishing works on Instagram only: your bot can generate video and publish it as an Instagram post. On LinkedIn and Facebook, attaching a video to a post fails cleanly with a video_unsupported error and a notification — nothing is silently posted without it.

Getting set up

Onboarding follows a fixed shape, with a couple of dashboard-driven moments along the way. See Connect social accounts for the full walkthrough.

1. Add a Brand (profile). A brand holds your shared voice, hashtags, signature line, and pacing settings. One brand can carry accounts on more than one platform.
2. Connect and sign in the account. Sign-in opens a real browser session. If the platform throws a 2FA challenge or CAPTCHA, you get a live VNC link to solve it yourself, then confirm. An account must read healthy before any automation runs.
3. Set up the brand from your account. The "Set up from my account" step reads your connected Instagram or LinkedIn account and drafts your brand fields — voice, ideal lead, signature line, hashtags, language. This runs in the dashboard. (Facebook is not supported here.)
4. Create a campaign. Pick the account, a target query, and the actions you want — like, comment, follow, dm. Outreach campaigns screen leads then cold-DM them; engagement campaigns warm an existing audience with likes and comments.

For Facebook publishing, the readiness check calls the prerequisite a Connected Facebook Page account. Connect the Page account in Social before asking the bot to draft or publish Facebook content; it unlocks posting, not outreach.

Once a campaign is active, GATE runs it automatically in the background, taking one paced action at a time. Your bot creates and steers campaigns; it does not sit in a loop firing actions.

Safety guardrails

Automation is rate-limited on purpose. Acting too fast or too aggressively is how social platforms flag and lock accounts, so GATE puts several gates between your campaign and your account:

• Action caps. Each action type (like, comment, follow, message, and more) has a rolling 24-hour day cap and an hourly cap. These come from a safety preset — from 0 (Brand New, most cautious) up to 4 (Established) — and you can override individual actions.
• Per-user cooldown. A cross-action cooldown (around 36 hours by default) stops the same person from being liked, commented on, followed, and DMed all in quick succession.
• Burst limits. A burst detector watches for too many actions in a short window and recommends a pause before the pattern looks robotic.
• Pacing. Actions are spread with randomized gaps inside your configured active hours, not fired back to back.
• Security scanner. After each action the system can scan the page for trouble signals (off, warn, or halt). In halt mode, a critical threat can lock the account until you review it.

These caps and cooldowns are configured per account in the dashboard's Autopilot dialog. Autopilot runs on Instagram (the full loop — likes, comments, follows, DMs, auto-reply) and LinkedIn (likes and outreach steps; in-place comments are still rolling out); Facebook has no autopilot at all, matching its content-only scope above. One more thing worth knowing: a newly added account doesn't start on the most cautious preset — it's created on preset 2 ("Intermediate") by default, so if the account itself is brand new, dial it down to 0 or 1 before turning outreach on.

Account access and revocation

Because this is first-party, your bot authenticates with its own token rather than a delegated provider connection. If a bot loses access to a specific account, calls return a 403. Access is controlled per bot, per account.

Going deeper

See Connect social accounts for the step-by-step setup, Reach out to influencers for running a creator-outreach push through your own accounts, and the integrations matrix for how social compares to GATE's other integrations.