If you lean on an app or a custom integration to run your social posting, here's something that just opened up. You can now schedule and publish Community posts through the Social Planner API, and pick exactly which Community member the post should appear as.

This one is squarely for the developer and integration-partner side of things. If that's not you, no action needed. If you build or connect tools into your account, read on.

What landed

Community posting through the API now behaves a lot more like the other social channels. Here's what you can do with it.

• List Community members. Pull back the members who are eligible to publish. You can search by name, page through the list, and you'll only get active, permitted members. For private Communities, you only see members of that specific group.
• Check a member is eligible. Before you schedule anything, you can confirm the member you picked is still active and allowed to publish.
• Publish as a specific member. When you create a Community post through the API, you choose which eligible member it goes out as.
• A final check at publish time. Right before the post goes live, the system checks the member again. If they've left the Community or lost permission, the post won't go out under the wrong name. It fails with a clear, useful error instead of slipping through unnoticed off the rails.

How it works

The flow is straightforward once your Community group is connected.

1. Connect a Community group in Marketing, then Social Planner, then Settings, then Social Accounts.
2. Use Get Accounts to grab the Community account ID.
3. Use Get Community Members to pull back the eligible members.
4. Pick the member you want the post published as.
5. Create the post using the Community post API.
6. Optionally validate the member before you schedule.
7. The system checks the member one more time just before publishing.

A few things to know

Connecting and managing your Community account still happens in the account interface, not the API. The API handles the listing, validating, scheduling, and publishing side.

Draft posts don't need you to choose a member to publish as. Member eligibility gets checked when posts are scheduled or published, and the member has to still be active and permitted at publish time. You'll also need the right Social Planner scopes for API access.

If you've been waiting to bring Community posting into your own workflows and marketplace apps, this is the piece that makes it possible. Go have a play with it.