Schedule YouTube videos and Shorts

Long videos and Shorts in one place

YouTube has two shelves that matter for most brands:

• Regular videos: horizontal, any length your account allows. YouTube limits uploads to 15 minutes by default and up to 12 hours for verified accounts.
• Shorts: YouTube treats vertical videos of up to 3 minutes as Shorts. See scheduling YouTube Shorts.

Both are uploaded the same way in Postika: one video per post. What decides the shelf is the video itself (its orientation and length), not a setting in Postika.

YouTube best practices when you schedule

• Front-load the description. Only the first lines show without expanding, so put the summary and the main link there.
• Use a few hashtags. YouTube ignores all hashtags on a video that has more than 60; three to five relevant ones are plenty.
• Publish at a steady time. Subscribers learn when to expect you. A calendar view makes a weekly slot easy to keep.
• Tag outgoing links. Links in a description are a common traffic source; add UTM parameters with the UTM builder so the visits show up correctly in your analytics.
• Recycle long videos into Shorts. Cut a 30–60 second vertical clip from each long video and schedule it a few days later, a classic content repurposing move.

Postika does not include YouTube analytics, comments or thumbnails management; use YouTube Studio for those.

What Postika checks for YouTube

YouTube measures the description limit in bytes, which means some characters (emoji, accented letters, non-Latin scripts) take more than one byte. If a description with many emoji is close to the limit, shorten it a little. The limits reference lists the official values for every network.

Planning YouTube with your AI

Your AI can't upload the video for you, because media cannot be sent over MCP. What it does well is everything around the upload: descriptions, a posting schedule and the cross-promotion posts on other networks.

A typical flow: you tell Claude or ChatGPT what the video is about, it creates a YouTube draft with the description on the right day, plus an X and LinkedIn post announcing it. You open the YouTube draft in Postika, add the video and schedule it.

Prompt: "Next Thursday 17:00 our video about pricing goes live on YouTube. Write the description as a draft, and schedule an X post and a LinkedIn post for 17:15 pointing to it, pending my approval."

See Claude for YouTube or the general AI hub.

A weekly YouTube routine with Postika

1. Monday: write the description for this week's video and save the YouTube post as a draft on Thursday.
2. Wednesday: export the final video, add it to the draft and set it to pending approval if someone else signs off.
3. Thursday: the video publishes at 17:00 in your project's time zone, with the X and LinkedIn announcements scheduled a few minutes later.
4. The following Tuesday: schedule a vertical Short cut from the same video.

Keeping YouTube in the same calendar as your other networks means you see the launch and its promotion together, instead of across three apps.