How-to guide • Published May 6, 2026

How to Schedule Social Media Posts from Google Sheets

One row in a Google Sheet, one scheduled post across every platform. Apps Script + Postproxy.

The shape of the spreadsheet

A practical content sheet has one row per post. Columns:

publish_at	profiles	body	media_url
2026-05-12 09:00	tiktok,instagram,youtube	New product drop …	https://cdn…/launch.mp4
2026-05-13 14:00	linkedin,threads	Our Q1 retro is live …
2026-05-14 10:00	twitter	Hot take: …

Six columns. Plain text. Anyone on the team can edit it. The pipeline reads rows where status is empty and writes back the resulting post ID once published.

Apps Script: ~50 lines

In Extensions → Apps Script, paste:

const POSTPROXY_API_KEY = "YOUR_KEY";

function publishPendingRows() {
  const sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
  const rows = sheet.getDataRange().getValues();
  const headers = rows[0];
  const idx = (name) => headers.indexOf(name);

  for (let i = 1; i < rows.length; i++) {
    const row = rows[i];
    if (row[idx("status")]) continue;
    if (!row[idx("body")]) continue;

    const profiles = String(row[idx("profiles")])
      .split(",").map((s) => s.trim()).filter(Boolean);
    const media = row[idx("media_url")] ? [row[idx("media_url")]] : [];
    const scheduledAt = new Date(row[idx("publish_at")]).toISOString();

    // Build platform-specific defaults: every platform-required field set sensibly
    const platforms = {};
    if (profiles.includes("tiktok")) {
      platforms.tiktok = { privacy_status: "PUBLIC_TO_EVERYONE" };
    }
    if (profiles.includes("youtube")) {
      platforms.youtube = { privacy_status: "public" };
    }
    if (profiles.includes("instagram") && media[0] && /\.(mp4|mov)$/i.test(media[0])) {
      platforms.instagram = { format: "reel" };
    }

    const response = UrlFetchApp.fetch("https://api.postproxy.dev/api/posts", {
      method: "post",
      contentType: "application/json",
      headers: { Authorization: "Bearer " + POSTPROXY_API_KEY },
      payload: JSON.stringify({
        post: { body: row[idx("body")], scheduled_at: scheduledAt },
        profiles,
        media,
        platforms,
      }),
      muteHttpExceptions: true,
    });

    const result = JSON.parse(response.getContentText());
    if (result.id) {
      sheet.getRange(i + 1, idx("status") + 1).setValue("scheduled");
      sheet.getRange(i + 1, idx("post_id") + 1).setValue(result.id);
    } else {
      sheet.getRange(i + 1, idx("status") + 1).setValue("error: " + (result.error || JSON.stringify(result.errors || "unknown")));
    }
  }
}

Then add a time-driven trigger in Apps Script (Edit → Triggers): run publishPendingRows every 15 minutes.

The script writes the Postproxy post ID into a post_id column and scheduled into status, so subsequent runs skip already-handled rows.

Reading status back into the sheet

If you want the sheet to show whether each post actually went live, add a result column:

function refreshStatuses() {
  const sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
  const rows = sheet.getDataRange().getValues();
  const headers = rows[0];
  const idx = (name) => headers.indexOf(name);

  for (let i = 1; i < rows.length; i++) {
    const postId = rows[i][idx("post_id")];
    if (!postId) continue;

    const response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(
      "https://api.postproxy.dev/api/posts/" + postId,
      { headers: { Authorization: "Bearer " + POSTPROXY_API_KEY } }
    );
    const post = JSON.parse(response.getContentText());
    const summary = (post.platforms || [])
      .map((p) => p.network + ":" + p.status)
      .join(", ");
    sheet.getRange(i + 1, idx("result") + 1).setValue(summary);
  }
}

Trigger this every hour. The result column shows tiktok:published, instagram:published, youtube:processing per row.

Note the response uses network (not platform) for the platform identifier inside each platforms[] entry.

Why use a sheet at all

Three reasons:

Editing without engineers. Marketers, founders, and ops people already live in spreadsheets.
Bulk operations. Copy-paste 50 rows; reorder; bulk-edit a hashtag.
Audit trail. Every change is in version history.

For more sophisticated workflows — content review, multi-stage approval — a database-backed approach (Airtable, Notion) gives more structure. See bulk upload from Airtable.

Limits and quotas

Apps Script has a 6-minute execution limit per run and a daily UrlFetch quota. With 50 rows and a 15-minute cadence, you’ll never hit either. At 500+ rows, switch to running the script from a server (Cloud Run, an EC2 cron) using the same Postproxy API.

For the cron-driven server-side version of the same pattern, see Scheduling social media posts programmatically with cron and API.

A more realistic sheet

Teams using this in production usually have more columns:

reviewer and priority are for the team workflow — they don’t go to the API. The script ignores any column it doesn’t know.

This is what makes the spreadsheet pattern scale: the sheet is the source of truth for the team, the script is the bridge to the publishing layer.