Suspending Posts with Hootsuite

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Video Transcript | Intro

Sense trouble in the air? Whether it’s a community tragedy, political event or a public brand misstep, a tone-deaf post going live at the wrong time can add fuel to the fire. Acting fast is important, and the first step in your crisis management strategy should be to hit pause on your scheduled posts.  Hootsuite’s Suspend Post feature allows admins to do just that. 

Pressing Stop: Networks and Teams View

On your desktop, go to your organization, click to suspend, enter a reason, and confirm. You’ll receive a confirmation email, and a banner outlining the details of the suspension will be visible to everyone in your organization. 

Paused Posts in the Planner

In the meantime, all of your scheduled posts will be marked as suspended in the Planner -- allowing you to assess and adjust your content strategy as the situation evolves. If sharing a strategic post makes sense -- say, to update your audience on the situation or provide a time-sensitive announcement -- you can still manually edit, create, and schedule content to be published directly from the planner --- or the composer -- by confirming your action.

Resuming Posts 

When you’re ready to resume your regular publishing, go to your organization and end the suspension. All posts that were scheduled beyond the suspension time will be published as planned. Posts that were scheduled to go out during the suspension can be rescheduled in the planner. 

Crisis Management

Remember, effective crisis management starts before any issue arises. It’s a good idea to include the suspension process in your crisis management plan, outlining how, when, and who should suspend posts. Because all organization admins and super admins can use the feature, it’s best practice to regularly audit your permission settings. Another thing to keep in mind -- all users in your organization can manually publish during a suspension. So make sure the whole team is clear on guidelines for posting in a crisis, and better yet, implement a publishing approval process in your Hootsuite organization.