Catch social posts stuck in approval before they miss their slot
Every weekday morning, get a Slack digest of the social posts still waiting on sign-off, with the ones about to go live flagged first.
Hootsuite
Slack BotMarketingOperationsNotifications & AlertsDaily DigestsEvery weekday at 8:30am, check Hootsuite for social posts that are still sitting in pending approval, and chase the ones that are about to miss their scheduled slot.
Use Hootsuite's Retrieve Outbound Messages to pull messages across a window running from 7 days in the past to 14 days in the future. Hootsuite requires both a start time and an end time on this call and the range must not exceed 4 weeks, so a 21 day window is safe. The backward half of the window matters: without it you cannot see posts whose publish time has already gone by. Page through all results rather than reading only the first page. Keep only the messages in the pending review or approval state, and discard anything already approved, sent, or rejected.
For each remaining message, compare its scheduled publish time to the current time and sort it into one of three buckets. Missed: the publish time has already passed while the post is still unapproved, which means it silently failed to go live. Urgent: the publish time falls within the next 48 hours. Upcoming: everything else still pending further out.
Use Retrieve Social Profiles to build a lookup from social profile id to a readable account name and network, so the digest names the real account, for example "Acme on LinkedIn", instead of a raw id. Note that scheduling one post to several profiles creates a separate Hootsuite message per profile, so group messages that share the same copy and publish time into a single digest entry and list their target accounts together.
If the Missed bucket and the Urgent bucket are both empty, do not post anything at all. Staying quiet on a calm morning matters more than a daily heartbeat, so never post an empty digest.
Otherwise post one message to the social team's Slack channel using Slack Bot's Send a Message. Lead with a Missed section when it is non-empty, since those posts have already failed to publish, then an Urgent section for anything going out within 48 hours, then a short Upcoming tail listing the rest. For every entry show the post copy trimmed to roughly 200 characters, the target account name, and the scheduled publish time in the team's local timezone with a relative hint such as "in 6 hours" or "2 days ago". Include the Hootsuite message id so someone can find the post quickly.
Open the digest with a one line summary such as "3 posts need sign-off, 1 already missed its slot". Send a single message rather than one message per item.
What does this prompt do?
- Checks your Hootsuite queue each weekday morning for posts still sitting in pending approval over the next two weeks
- Works out how close each one is to its scheduled publish time and puts anything going live within 48 hours at the top
- Separately calls out posts whose publish time has already passed while still unapproved, so you find out they never went live
- Posts one tidy digest to your social team's Slack channel, and stays silent on mornings when nothing is at risk
What do I need to use this?
- A Hootsuite account on a plan that includes post approvals, with permission to see scheduled and pending posts
- A Slack workspace and the channel where your social team coordinates
- Posts submitted through Hootsuite's approval flow, so they show up as awaiting review
How can I customize it?
- Change the timing, for example run it every day including weekends, or twice a day for fast-moving accounts
- Adjust what counts as urgent (the default is publishing within 48 hours) or how far ahead it looks (the default is 14 days)
- Send the digest to a different channel, or split it so each account manager is messaged about their own clients
FAQs
What counts as urgent?
Will it message my team every single morning?
What happens to posts that already missed their publish time?
Does this approve the posts for me?
We schedule one post to several accounts at once. Will the digest repeat it?
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Stop chasing social sign-offs by hand.
Let the approval queue chase itself every morning, so no post quietly misses its slot again.