Troubleshoot social posting

Most social posting problems fall into three buckets: the account's connection went bad, the media or caption broke a platform rule, or the network itself is temporarily rejecting requests. This article walks through diagnosing and fixing each.

#Start here: read the failed post's error message

Open the failed post from the Planner list view and read the specific error it shows. Social Planner surfaces the actual error returned by the network, and that message almost always tells you which of the three buckets above you're dealing with — don't guess before checking it.

#"Account disconnected" or a token/permission error

This is the single most common failure, and it means the network revoked or expired the permission token Social Planner uses to post on your behalf. It happens when:

• A password changed on the connected account.
• Someone removed app access from the network's own security/app settings.
• The network updated its required permissions and your existing token no longer covers them.
• A later reauthorization of the same login didn't include every Page/account that was previously connected (this is a well-known Facebook-specific trap — see the warning below).

Fix: Go to Marketing > Social Planner > Settings, find the account showing a disconnected or expired status, and reconnect it using a login with current admin or posting access. Once reconnected, reopen any posts that failed because of it and republish them — reconnecting doesn't automatically retry posts that already failed.

Warning: If a Facebook Page's posts suddenly start failing with a token error and you didn't touch that Page's connection, check whether you recently reconnected or reauthorized a different Page on the same Facebook login. Facebook's permission screen lets you select which Pages to share access to — if you reauthorize and don't select every Page, Facebook silently deauthorizes the ones left out, even if they were working fine before. Always grant access to every connected Page when Facebook's permission screen appears, not just the one you're actively working on.

#Common error causes by platform

If an error looks like a temporary platform hiccup (server errors in the 5xx range, or a vague "unexpected error"), a hard-refresh and retry after a few minutes often resolves it without any changes on your end — networks do have their own brief outages.

#Media size and format limits per network

Media that doesn't meet a platform's requirements gets flagged before you can schedule or publish, or fails on publish if the issue wasn't caught earlier. Keep these limits in mind when preparing images and video:

#Images

#Video

#Caption length limits

Tip: If a caption gets flagged as too long, trim it before switching platforms in Customize for Each Channel rather than writing one generic caption and hoping it fits everywhere — the limits above vary by a wide margin (Google Business Profile's 1,500 characters versus Facebook's 62,000).

#Instagram and Facebook permission gotchas

• Personal Instagram accounts can't connect at all — only Business or Creator accounts tied to a Facebook Page you admin.
• Personal Facebook profiles can't be connected — only Pages.
• Connecting with a login that has viewer or editor-only access (rather than admin) on a Page will often let the connection appear successful, then fail the first time you actually try to publish. If a brand-new connection fails immediately, this is the first thing to check.
• Reauthorizing Facebook access for one Page can silently break other connected Pages on the same login if you don't grant access to all of them (see the warning above).

#YouTube upload rules

• Only the channel's primary owner can authorize the connection — a Manager role on YouTube can't connect the channel through Social Planner, even with full content-management rights inside YouTube Studio itself.
• Shorts are capped at 60 seconds and should use a 9:16 vertical frame; a non-vertical video may get auto-cropped rather than rejected outright.
• Custom thumbnails are supported for regular YouTube videos but not for Shorts.
• The YouTube connection token doesn't expire on a schedule the way some other platforms' do — it stays active until manually revoked, so YouTube disconnections are less common than Facebook or LinkedIn token expirations.

#What done looks like

When a post fails, you can read its specific error, tell within a minute whether it's a connection problem or a content/media problem, and know exactly which limit table above to check before re-uploading.

#Related articles

• Social Planner overview
• Connect your social accounts
• Create, schedule, and publish posts

#Frequently asked questions

#A post failed and I fixed the issue — do I need to recreate it?

No. Open the failed post, make your correction (reconnect the account, trim the caption, swap the media), and republish or reschedule it from the same post — no need to start over.

#Why did a post that worked yesterday fail today with no changes on my end?

The most likely cause is the connected account's token expiring or getting revoked between yesterday and today — this can happen without any action on your part if the network's own security settings changed something (a password reset, a security review, or an app-permission update). Check the account's connection status first.

#Can I avoid hitting posting rate limits?

Spread scheduled posts out rather than batching many at the exact same time to the same platform, especially on Instagram, which enforces a daily cap. If you're running Category Queues or RSS auto-posting alongside manually scheduled posts to the same account, keep an eye on total volume across all three sources.