Scheduling and publishing
Posting slots and rescheduling
Posting slots are your weekly rhythm — Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 10:00, say. Once they exist, scheduling is one click and the calendar shows where the gaps are.
Setting slots
- Open Settings, then the Posting slots card. Only owners can change them.
- Select Add Mon/Wed/Fri 10:00 for a sensible starting point, or add your own.
- For each slot, pick a weekday, a time, and either All channels or one channel.
Slots are per brand, in that brand's time zone, and a brand can keep up to 60 of them. Remove one with Remove.
Add to next slot
On an approved or scheduled post, the schedule form shows Next free slot with the date and time, and a button that fills the field. PlanSend looks up to eight weeks ahead for a slot covering that post's channels which nothing has taken yet. If there is none, it says so and you pick a time by hand.
You can also start from the calendar: select a free-slot marker in week or day view and the composer opens with that time noted, ready to be used when you schedule.
Scheduling
Type a local date and time in the brand's time zone and select Schedule. Times must be in the future. Publish now schedules the current minute through exactly the same path, so it obeys the same approval rules; the publisher picks it up on its next run, usually within a minute.
Rescheduling
Only approved and scheduled posts can move. There are three ways:
- Drag the post on the week or day grid. On a phone, hold it briefly first.
- Move to another time on the post page, which works without JavaScript.
- Cancel the schedule and set a new time. A cancelled post keeps its approval if nothing was edited.
A move re-runs the approval check and the per-network checks, so a move that would break a network's rules is refused with the reason. Moves are refused once publishing has started, or when a revision already has publishing history, because that could publish the same post twice. A failed post is not moved either: fix it and schedule it again from the post page.
Time zones
Every brand has one explicit time zone, set in Settings. Times you type are that brand's local time, and PlanSend stores both the local intent and the exact instant, so posts do not shift when the clocks change. If you work across brands in different countries, check the zone shown next to the schedule field before typing.
Common questions
- Do slots publish posts automatically?
- No. A slot is a suggested time, never an automatic queue. A post is only published once somebody schedules it into a time.
- What happens to my slots when the clocks change?
- Nothing. Slots are stored as a weekday and a wall-clock time in the brand's time zone, so a 10:00 slot stays at 10:00 local time through daylight saving changes.
- Why is a slot not offered as free?
- A slot is occupied when a post is already scheduled at that exact time for one of the channels it covers. Drafts and approved-but-unscheduled posts do not hold a slot.
Still stuck? Email [email protected].