Create a Facebook post, story, or reel

  • Sep 3, 2026
  • Knowledge

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  Article updated: June 20, 2026

Create a Facebook post, story, or reel

Create and publish posts, stories, and reels to your Facebook Pages. To save time, you can publish to several Facebook accounts or social networks at once. You can choose to publish posts right away, or schedule them in advance for a specific day and time.

This article describes the new Social OS experience. If you haven't switched yet, select the Classic tab for instructions. Learn more about the Social OS experience.

Create your post, story, or reel

You can create Facebook posts, stories, and reels in Hootsuite. Each post type supports video, but is slightly different.

  • Posts - Appear in your main newsfeed, and can include text, images, and videos of various aspect ratios and length.
  • Stories - Disappear from your profile, feed, and messages after 24 hours, unless you add them to your profile as story highlights. If you're posting to your Facebook account with direct publishing, you can only include one image or one video with each story, and videos must be 60 seconds or less. You can add alt-text to images and SRT (closed caption) files and custom thumbnails to video.
  • Reels - Appear in your main newsfeed and your Reels feed. Reels are short-form videos. You can only include one video with each reel, and videos must be 90 seconds or less. You can add SRT (closed caption) files and custom thumbnails to your video.

Hootsuite is not able to support creating event posts or polls.

Social OSClassic
  1. Go to Perch, then select Calendar to start and schedule your post in a calendar view, or select Create a post.
  2. Select the Facebook accounts you'd like to publish to, and then select whether you want to create a post, a story, or a reel. (Option for Advanced, Business, and Enterprise plans) - Select your organization, and then select Campaign to associate your post with a current or future campaign. Learn more about content campaigns.
    Facebook post showing the post type options, Post, Story, or Reel.
    To protect user privacy, Facebook does not allow you to publish to personal profiles from Hootsuite.
  3. Create your post. The character limit for Facebook posts and reels is 63,206.

    Note: You cannot add text captions to Facebook stories. However, you can add text, stickers and special effects to your image or video using our Image Editor.

    You can use all of the following in your post or reel:

    • Links - Enter or paste a link in your post to drive traffic to your website, blog, or product. You can shorten your links in Hootsuite for a tidier look, and add tracking parameters so you can see how much web traffic comes from those links. Learn how to shorten and track links.
    • Mentions of a user or Page - Enter @username in your post to invite others on social to join a conversation, and help your post reach their audience as well as your own. Facebook allows their Pages to be mentioned by other Facebook Pages. Facebook doesn't support mentions of Facebook profiles in third parties like Hootsuite.

      Note: To ensure your content is delivered successfully, limit your mentions to 10 or fewer. If your post contains more than 10 mentions, Meta may flag the post as spam and publishing will fail.

    • Hashtags - Enter your own hashtags or select AI hashtag suggestions to find hashtags that work with your post text and media. Read our guide to using hashtags on every network.
    • Emoji - Select the smiley face to add emoji.
  4. (Optional) Let AI help you write or refine your post - Select Wisdom to have Wisdom help you optimize your post for your selected social network, change the tone of your post, or make your post actionable. This option is only available to organizations who support using AI (see Hootsuite AI terms).
  5. Add media to your post. Drag images, GIFs, or videos from your computer into your post, or select Add media to upload files.
    You can also add media using:

Work with images

You can edit your images — crop, add filters, add alt text, and more — right in Hootsuite. Point to the image, select More, and then select Edit image to make changes, or select Edit alternative text to add alt text. Learn how to customize your images in Hootsuite.

A cursor pointing to an image thumbnail, revealing the options to add alt text and edit the image.

Note: When uploading images:

  • Multiple images are combined into a single post. You can drag the images to reorder them.
  • GIFs are limited to one per post.
  • Images posted to Facebook Pages are added to Timeline Photos.

Learn more about image file requirements.

Work with videos

You can edit your videos — add filters, stickers, music, captions, and more — right in Hootsuite. Point to the video, select More, and then select Edit video to make changes, or select Video settings to view file properties and add captions. Learn more about what you can do with videos in Hootsuite.

A cursor pointing to a video thumbnail, revealing the options to view settings and edit the video.

Learn more about video file requirements.

Advanced options

When you create your post, you can take advantage of additional options, such as promoting your post or selecting a specific audience for your post.

  • Ask for a review (Advanced, Business, and Enterprise plans) - Invite a team member to review and approve your posts before they go live. Select one or more team members, or a team, from the Request approval list to help make sure your post is on-brand and polished before you publish it. Learn more about approvals.
  • Boost your post - Select Boost this post to boost your post on Facebook. Learn how to promote your Facebook Page post.
  • Specify targeting for a Facebook post - Select Add next to Facebook target audience to select who you’d like to see your post. Select age, country, region, city, ZIP, and postal codes.
  • Apply a tag (Advanced, Business, and Enterprise plans) - Select Add next to Tags to apply tags to your posts and analyze their performance in Hootsuite Analytics. Find out more about tagging posts.

Publish your Facebook post

When you’re finished creating your post, take a look at the preview on the right to see how it will look on Facebook. You'll be alerted if there are any issues. Save a draft of your post if you're not ready to publish or schedule it. Otherwise, select a Post now or Schedule for later option.

You can use the mobile notification workflow to publish your post to Facebook. Use this method to add final touches to your post in Facebook like filters and effects. Select the Publish via mobile notification toggle, and then select Post now or Schedule to send a push notification to your Hootsuite mobile app when it's time to post. Learn more about how this works.

Learn how to find and manage your drafts, published posts, and scheduled posts in a calendar view.

  Learn more

 

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Create a Facebook post, story, or reel
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