Hello there!

It's me again, and yes, that means we've added a slick new feature to our product. Now, you'll be able to pause all the posts that are scheduled for your brand and ensure that they don't go out as per plan!

"Hold on a sec", you say, "Why would I even want to do that?"

Because things can suddenly go out of control, and when that happens, sticking rigidly to your plan may not be the best idea in the world. It can make you look apathetic, or worse, insensitive, depending on the content of your posts.

Sure, you could send out a tweet addressing the situation in real time, but if you don't manage your scheduled posts properly, it can still be disastrous. Take a look at LiveNation's tweets, after they cancelled a Radiohead concert because the staging collapsed before the show.

Uh-oh.

So how do you deal with this? 

In real life (and on social media) unexpected events like these can happen at any time. 

Whenever something unexpected happens, just make sure you pause your scheduled posts, and you can avoid all that embarrassment. 

Situations like these could result from external factors that aren't under your control, such as a natural disaster. You may not want to promote your brand at such time and risk being seen as insensitive. 

Or it could also be an internal factor. Maybe there's a downtime on your server, and so you're getting a lot tweets asking for clarification. You can temporarily pause your scheduled posts and address these questions and then hit resume once you've fixed the situation.

It's simple! Head over to Setup and select Brand Settings. In the Brand Information section, click on Pause Posts, and then add a message to the rest of your team so that they know what's going on. Oh, and you'll have to be an Admin to do this.

The message you add while pausing posts will be created as a new thread in your Collaborate tab, so that you and team can take discussions further. Once you decide to resume the posts, head back to the same section and hit resume, and all your scheduled posts will go out as per the schedule. That simple!

Yes, I know what you're thinking. If you pause all scheduled posts on the 16th of the month, and then resume posts on the 26th, what happens to the posts that were scheduled between those dates?

If you look closely, you'll see that in the Posts tab, we've replaced the Failed Posts view with Unpublished Posts. Under Unpublished Posts, you'll see a category called Unattempted Posts, which will list out all the posts that couldn't be published because the posts were paused at the time they were supposed to go out. From here, you can directly reschedule these posts to a different date.

Oh, and one more thing. While the scheduled posts are paused, you can still go ahead and publish new posts, so that you can still communicate with your customers, especially in times of emergency.

That's it from us for now! Go forth, and take full control of your social media posts, but be sure to check back here once a while for further updates :)

Cheers!

Vishal

Zoho Social.