Bulk schedule your posts

You can save serious time by scheduling hundreds of posts at once with Bulk message upload. Put all of your prepared content into a CSV file and upload it. Then you can preview and edit your posts in Hootsuite, or schedule them right away.

When scheduling in bulk, Hootsuite lets you know about any errors found in specific posts, so you can quickly fix them or discard individual posts. Use Bulk message upload to create posts for Twitter, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn Pages and profiles, TikTok, and Instagram Business profiles (direct publishing).

After you upload your CSV, Bulk message upload lets you add images and videos to your posts and customize link previews before scheduling.

Prepare a bulk post file

A maximum of 350 posts can be scheduled using Bulk message upload. This could be 350 posts to 1 social account, or 50 posts to 7 social accounts. Any posts already scheduled for those social accounts in Hootsuite need to be included in that 350 post maximum.

For example, if there are 100 posts already scheduled to your Twitter profile, you could bulk upload 250 more posts to it. This only applies to bulk posting. There is no limit to the number of posts that can be manually scheduled after you upload a bulk file.

1. Go to Plan, and then select Content.
2. Select Bulk message upload.
3. Scroll down and select Download sample CSV to start with a sample CSV file.
4. Open the sample file in Google Sheets or any other program that saves files in CSV format.
   
   Important: Microsoft Excel can cause errors by converting years into YY format instead of the required YYYY when it exports to CSV. If you only have Excel, you can work around this by making sure the format for the date column is set to General and not Date.
5. Using the following formatting rules, populate the file with your content, and then save or export the file to CSV.

Formatting rules:

• Column A - Enter a post date and time (24-hour time) - Times must be set in the future (at least 20 minutes from upload time) and must end in either a 5 or a 0. For example, 10:45 or 10:50. Define only one post per time slot. Accepted date formats are as follows. Use one format exclusively throughout your CSV:
  • day/month/year hour:minute
  • month/day/year hour:minute
  • year/month/day hour:minute
  • year/day/month hour:minute
• Column B - Create your post. Remember, Twitter has a limit of 280 characters, including the URL (which reserves at most 23 characters).
• Column C - Optionally, enter a link using the full URL. You can choose to have these automatically shorten to Ow.ly links when you upload to Bulk message upload.
• Duplicate posts are not allowed.

Schedule messages with Bulk message upload

Using Bulk message upload involves four steps: upload your posts, review and fix any errors, edit and customize your posts individually, and then schedule your posts.

Upload posts in bulk

1. Go to Plan, and then select Content.
2. Select Bulk message upload.
3. Select your CSV file.
4. Select the social accounts to publish the posts to. When publishing to X (formerly Twitter), only one X account can be selected at a time.
5. Optionally, select Do not shorten links to preserve your URL (not shorten it using Ow.ly).
6. Select Review posts.

Review and fix errors

If Bulk message upload detects any errors in your uploaded posts, those posts are listed with a red banner explaining the issue. Select a post to edit it. A post cannot be scheduled until the issue is fixed. Alternatively, select Delete to delete it.

When errors are fixed, the red banners no longer appear. Posts may contain more than one error.

Edit and customize

If your posts are ready to go, you can select Schedule all posts. Otherwise, you can select posts individually to review and edit them before scheduling. Select a post to edit the post text or do any of the following:

• Preview the post - Select Preview to see how the post will look on each social network.
• Add an image or video - Select Upload media or Media library.
• Remove or customize the link preview - Select Customize link preview to remove or customize the link preview image, or update the title or description, and then select Save.
• Edit the scheduled time - Select the scheduled time at the bottom of the post.

Go to Plan to edit the post after it is scheduled.

Schedule

Select Schedule to schedule a post individually, select Schedule all posts to schedule all the posts in your CSV, or select the posts you want to schedule or delete and select Schedule selection or Delete selection.

After all your posts are scheduled, select View scheduled posts to customize them further. You can filter your scheduled posts by social account to find the ones you are looking for.

Any posts that have not been scheduled when you leave Bulk message upload are discarded.

Important: Hootsuite shows upcoming content for a two-year window. Posts scheduled beyond two years are not visible in Plan. You will only be able to edit or delete them when they fall within the two-year visibility period.