Social media

User guide › Apps › Social media

Organic posting only

This app — Social Marketing, at /social-marketing — is about unpaid posts to feeds you own. Paid campaigns are two separate apps you install separately; they are covered in Paid ads. Nothing you do here spends money.

The sidebar entry sits under the Marketing menu and opens three surfaces:

Social Marketing is one of the channel apps Omni marketing pulls in when you install it. It also works perfectly well on its own.

Connect the accounts first

The composer can only offer you accounts that are already connected. If you open a new post and see No social accounts connected. Connect Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or X on the Integrations page first., use the Open Integrations button next to it.

On the Integrations page the relevant cards live under Social:

Already connected Meta for the inbox? Messaging and posting are two cards over one Meta connection. Connecting the Facebook & Instagram card adds posting without dropping the messaging you already granted — and vice versa. If your Pages don't appear in the composer, that card is the one to (re)connect.

What each network accepts

The composer counts characters live against each network's limit and tells you {n} characters left — or {n} over the limit once you're past it.

Composing a post

1. Open the composer Posts → New post. From the calendar you can also click an empty day, which opens the composer already dated to that day.
2. Give it an internal title Internal title is optional and, as the field says, "for your reference only, never published". It's what shows in the Posts list.
3. Write the shared text Post text is the base copy every enabled network uses unless you override it.
4. Attach media (optional) Media → Add image / video. Files upload to your workspace storage and are shared across every enabled network. Read the warning above before relying on them.
5. Turn on the networks you want Under Publish to there's one card per network that has a connected account. Switch a card on to include it. If you have more than one account on a network — several Facebook Pages, say — pick one under Account.
6. Tailor per network (optional) Each card has a Caption for … box (leave it empty to use the shared post text) and a Hashtags box.
7. Decide when Fill Schedule to publish at a time, or leave it empty — "Leave empty to keep as a draft you publish manually later."
8. Save Save draft keeps it as a draft. Save & schedule saves it and arms it for the time you picked.

You need at least one network switched on before scheduling — otherwise you'll get Enable at least one network to publish to.

Scheduling and the content calendar

Calendar shows every post that has a scheduled time, colour-coded by status, with the networks on the chip.

• Drag to reschedule. Only posts that are still Draft, In review or Scheduled can be dragged; published ones are pinned where they are.
• Click a day (or the + button) to start a new post pre-dated to that day.
• Click an existing post to open it in the composer.

Scheduled posts are picked up automatically — a background sweep runs every minute and dispatches anything whose time has arrived. You don't have to leave the tab open.

Publishing now

On a saved post, Publish now pushes it out immediately. It asks first: "Publish this post to the selected networks now? This posts to your live accounts."

Each network is published independently. One network failing never blocks the others — you get a post marked Partly published with the failure named on the network that broke. Running Publish now again on such a post retries only the networks that failed; anything already live is left alone and never posted twice.

Reading the statuses

The post as a whole:

Each network on the post carries its own status too — Queued, Publishing, Published, Failed or Skipped — shown under Results on the post.

Once a post is past the editable stages the composer turns read-only and says so: "This post is … and can no longer be edited."

Where engagement shows up

Two places:

• On the post — the Results panel lists each network's publish status, any error, and its latest engagement figures.
• Analytics — cross-network totals plus a per-network table, counting Posts, Impressions, Likes, Comments and Shares.

Numbers are pulled from each network on an hourly cycle, not pushed live — so a post published five minutes ago will read empty until the next pull. That's what No published posts with metrics yet. Publish a post and check back after the next hourly poll. means.

Who can do what

Seeing the app and being allowed to post are two different grants. The app has two permissions, handed out per person under Settings → Module Access:

More on granting these: Permissions.

How it fits with the rest of marketing

• Audiences are not used here. A social post is a broadcast to a public feed, so the composer targets connected accounts directly rather than a contact list. Audiences are for the channels that send to individuals, and for paid targeting.
• Paid is a separate app. Boosting or running ads on Facebook, Instagram or Google is Paid ads.
• Multi-channel campaigns — if a social post is one beat in a larger sequence, see Campaign lifecycle and Omni marketing.

When something goes wrong