Content Mix Ratio Planner – Turning Shares Into Whole Posts
A content pillar is one of the handful of recurring buckets your posts fall into: educational explainers, behind-the-scenes glimpses, customer stories, the occasional thing you are actually selling. Deciding the balance between them is easy to describe and surprisingly fiddly to execute, because a content mix expressed in percentages has to be published as whole posts. This planner does that conversion, and then tells you how close your published work landed to the split you picked.
Why the percentages never divide cleanly
Take a batch of 30 posts split four ways — educational 40, behind the scenes 25, promotional 20, user-generated 15. The exact figures are 12.0, 7.5, 6.0 and 4.5. Round each one on its own and you get 12, 8, 6 and 5, which is 31 posts — one more than you have. Round down instead and you are a post short. Either way the column no longer adds up to the batch you started with, which is exactly the kind of small wrongness that makes people stop trusting a calculator.
The fix is the largest-remainder method, borrowed from seat allocation in proportional elections. Every pillar first takes its whole-number floor — 12, 7, 6 and 4, totalling 29. That leaves one post spare, and it goes to whichever pillar has the biggest fractional remainder. Here two pillars are tied on 0.5, so the larger share breaks the tie and behind-the-scenes takes it: 12, 8, 6, 4 — exactly 30. Rows that collected a leftover post are flagged in the results table, because rounding you cannot see is rounding you will not believe.
Shares are weights, not literal percentages
Real tables rarely sum to a tidy 100. If yours reads 50, 30 and 15, the planner allocates in proportion anyway — as though it read 52.6, 31.6 and 15.8 — and says so rather than refusing to compute. The normalised share of a pillar is simply:
pᵢ = wᵢ / Σw and then postsᵢ ≈ N × pᵢ
A Normalise to 100 button rewrites the entered numbers in place when you would rather see them tidy, and it applies the same remainder correction at one decimal place so the rewritten shares total exactly 100.0. A pillar left at zero is legal: it receives no posts but stays in the table and the charts, so a bucket you deliberately emptied does not silently vanish from your plan.
Reading the drift in Review mode
Mixes drift for ordinary reasons. A launch swallows a month, one format turns out to be far cheaper to produce than the rest, a collaboration lands three posts in a pillar you barely use. Review mode reveals an Actual posts column, and the two stacked bars let you see the segment boundaries fail to line up before you read a single number.
Two figures quantify it. Drift in percentage points compares published share against target share. The post delta compares counts, with the target recomputed at the number of posts you actually made — comparing fifteen real posts against a target built for a different batch size would tell you nothing. Both are reported as over or under the target you set, never as too much or too little.
Where this sits among the planning tools
The division of labour is deliberate. A posting frequency planner works out how many posts your hours support. This planner takes that batch size as given and decides what kind they are. A content calendar generator then places them on which days. So you will find no dates, weekdays or times here at all: the output is an undated batch of posts, ready to carry into whichever scheduling step comes next. Copy it as a Markdown table or plain text, or share the link — the whole plan travels in the query string.