Internal Notes and Tags on Each Post for Easier Hand-Offs and Reviews

Hand-off notes are easiest to find right next to the post

When several people run social media, small hand-off notes come up for every post. "The manager has confirmed the photo," "Swap this out if the price changes," "We're checking this wording with the client." When these exchanges are scattered across chat and email, it takes a long time later to find out why a post says what it says. When the person in charge changes, the history itself is lost.

Another headache is the review. At the end of the month, if you try to count "which posts were this month's campaign" or "how many new product announcements we published," the post text alone won't tell you. You can mark posts with hashtags, but those appear on social media, and on X adding more hashtags can make a post less likely to be recommended (Pre-Post Check).

SNS TOWN internal notes and tags are both internal-only information that never appears on social media. You can tie hand-off notes and categories to a post without touching the post text.

Internal notes: a hand-off note for each post

At the bottom of each post's page there is an "Internal notes" field. Write something and press "Leave notes," and it stacks up in order from oldest, with the writer's name and the date and time. Each note can be up to 2,000 characters.

You can leave notes on a post in any state: draft, scheduled, or already posted. For example:

• To the approver: "The figure comes from last month's in-store survey. Send it back if anything bothers you."
• Why you held it back: "The forecast changed to rain, so we're moving this event announcement to next week."
• A record after posting: "Three people said 'saw your post' at the shop."

You can delete only your own notes. Nobody can delete or rewrite someone else's, so the history stays intact.

Instead of adding more and more approval steps, we recommend conveying the reason for a send-back in an internal note. In a small team, the more approval steps you add, the more likely approvals are to jam. The whole approval flow is explained in The Approval Flow and Building an Approval Workflow.

Tags: sort posts by campaign or type

At the top of the Internal notes field is a "Tags" input. Enter tags separated by commas, spaces or the like, for example "New product, Campaign." You can add the leading # or leave it off. Each post can have up to 5 tags, and each tag can be up to 20 characters.

The input suggests the tags most used in that company or brand, most frequent first. This helps you avoid variants in spelling such as "New product" and "New products."

Posts with tags show them as badges like "#New product" in the posts list. Click a badge to open a list narrowed to posts with that tag. For a company that uses at least one tag, a tag selector appears to the right of the status filter above the list, so you can stack filters, such as "posts that went out and are tagged Campaign."

Examples of how to tag

Tags can be decided freely for each company. If you aren't sure, the shortcut is to tag by the angle you want to count at review time.

If your company has decided on content pillars, using the pillar names as tags shows you at a glance whether the number of posts is lopsided between them. How to decide pillars is explained in Content Pillars for Your Posts.

Drafts created from RSS get the "RSS" tag from the start (Drafts from RSS).

They follow along into export, duplication and bulk scheduling

Internal notes and tags are not information that lives only on a post's screen.

• CSV export: the posts CSV includes "Internal notes" and "Tags" columns. Counting by tag in a spreadsheet gives you the groundwork for monthly reports
• CSV bulk scheduling: if you write tags in the third column of the CSV you import, the tags are attached at the same time as the schedule (optional)
• Duplicating a post: when you duplicate a post to another account, the tags are copied with it

For the exact format of export and bulk scheduling, see CSV Bulk Scheduling and Export. How to turn these into a monthly report is covered in How to Make a Monthly Report.

Who can write and who can read

Every member of that company or brand can read internal notes and tags. Admins and editors can write and add them, and people with the Viewer role can only read. If you have outsourced social media to an outside party, inviting them as an editor and communicating through internal notes keeps the history of confirmations with each post. For the differences between roles, see Members and Roles.

How to use it

1. From the posts list or calendar, open a post
2. Enter words in "Tags" in the field below and press "Save"
3. If you have a hand-off note, write it in "Internal notes" and press "Leave notes"
4. Review posts by tag using the "#tag" badges in the list or the tag selector at the top

How to use the list is shown with screenshots in Finding Posts in the List.

Frequently asked questions