Back to Basics: How To Edit Social Media Posts After They’ve Been Published

26 Jun Back to Basics: How To Edit Social Media Posts After They’ve Been Published

Your eyes can get so tired and overwhelmed from reading tons of copy, sitting in front of a computer screen all day, and being on your phone. Sometimes even several pairs of eyes can miss errors. Maybe you hit “post” before getting the link in your caption, or noticed a word is misspelled. Don’t panic yet – in this post I’ll detail how you can edit social media posts after they’ve been published.

Editing posts after they’ve been published isn’t available on all platforms, and there are restrictions to what you can edit. Here are some social media networks and their post editing capabilities.

Facebook

On Facebook you’ll be able to edit captions, but images and videos . If you attached the wrong photo or video you’ll have to delete it and start over.  If you missed a coma misspelled a word in your caption, or have to tag another brand, you’ll be able to fix that error. Editing is available on the page managers app also.

One thing to keep in mind about editing posts on your Facebook fan page is that edits are visible and can be made by any page admin. This goes for changes made before the post gets published. Edits are also public and your fans will be able to see them – but it won’t be in an obvious way.  They’ll need to click on the dropdown menu on the top right of the post then click on “view edit history”. They’ll then be able to see all the edits that have been made to the particular post (but they will not see edits made before the posts were published).

One more thing to keep in mind is that posts that have been boosted or are part of an ad campaign cannot be edited.

To edit a post you’ve published on your page:

1. Go to the post
2. Click the 3 dots on the top right corner of your post and choose “Edit Post”
3. Make your desired edits to your post and click “Save”

Here is a hack:

If you edit your post on Facebook’s Pages app, you’ll be able to add photos to your post. This revealed a hack where I uploaded an extra photo to a post, saved it, then went back and deleted the undesired photo!

Twitter

Unfortunately, once you’ve hit the “Tweet” button your post is not editable. You’ll have to delete your tweet, make your edits and tweet your post out again.

Instagram

On Instagram, just like on Facebook you won’t be able to switch a photo or video after you’ve published your post. But, if you don’t like your caption, you can change it. You can also add or change any location tag, as well as add or delete account tags on the post. You can also add or edit Alt text. As of right now you will only be able to edit Instagram captions from the app on your mobile device.

To edit your Instagram posts:

1. Navigate to your post
2. Click the 3 dots on the top right of your post
3. Hit the “Edit” button
4. Go ahead and edit your caption, change your location, add account tags to your photo or video
5. Hit “Done” on the upper right hand side

Pinterest

On Pinterest, your published pin photo, video or carousel can’t be swapped out. What you can edit are your  pin’s board, section, title, description and the link your pin goes to. You can even edit on the go via the Pinterest app.

To edit your Pinterest Pin:

1. Go to your pin
2. Click the pencil icon on the upper left hand side
3. Edit the sections you’d like to change
4. Hit “Save”

LinkedIn

Recently LinkedIn added the ability to edit posts on both Company Pages and personal profile updates! Like the other networks, the image or video you use on your post cannot be edited. You can change your caption.

To edit your posts on LinkedIn

1. Find your post
2. Click the 3 dots on the upper right hand side of your update
3. Edit your caption, add or remove hashtags and links

If you published the post as a link, you’ll have to delete the post and simply changing the link in the caption will not work.

I hope this helps clear up any confusion about editing your already published social media posts. For the most part, the creative part of your posts aren’t interchangeable, but captions are. Get familiar with each social media network and it’s capabilities so you are prepared on what steps to take if any mistakes do happen, so you’re ready to deal with how to proceed.

<3 DhariLo