Using Collaborative Drafts in Hootsuite

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Video Transcript | Intro

Hootsuite’s Collaborative Drafts is a publishing feature for safely preparing and collaborating on posts before they go live. In this video, you’ll learn to create and edit drafts that will be visible to members of your organization, and manage them as part of your calendar of planned content.

Creating Drafts

To create a draft, open Composer and begin typing your message. You can save it as a draft NOW or at any time during the composing process. Now select your social network. Please note that only team members with permissions to that network will be able to interact with your draft. If you don’t select any social networks, the draft will only be visible to you. We recommend assigning a date and time to your draft, which then lets you view and manage it in Hootsuite Planner, alongside your other scheduled content.  

Finding Your Drafts

The Content tab in the Hootsuite Publisher shows ALL your drafts in one place, including those that weren’t assigned a date and time. The Planner tab on the other hand, gives a more detailed view of drafts that have been assigned a date and time alongside other scheduled posts. Drafts appear in grey, while scheduled posts are bold. You can also filter by social network, or by organization. 

Reviewing your drafts in Planner is the best way to strategically build your calendar of social media content. By viewing drafts alongside what’s already scheduled, you can fill content gaps, and plot out upcoming campaigns. Colleagues who are crafting posts for the same social network will be able to see drafts that others have started, and collaborate on editing them.  

Editing Drafts

You can edit, duplicate, or delete drafts in either the Planner tab OR the Content tab. The name of the draft's primary author will always be retained for easy reference. Enterprise users who only have limited permissions to a social network can only view and duplicate a draft, but never edit. 

If you duplicate a draft,  a new version is created so that can you safely make changes without altering the original. Use duplicate to quickly plan a series of posts that contain similar content. For example, a social marketing team could create a series of posts to support a Halloween campaign.  

It’s important to remember that content saved as a draft will not publish. When you’re ready for your draft to go live, simply choose schedule or post it right away. 

Check out our features page to learn more about what you can accomplish with Hootsuite.