Four Things You Need to Know about Scheduled Facebook Posts
If you manage your company’s Facebook page, you’ve probably faced the dilemma of being able to predict an appropriate Facebook post for a future date, and then being forced to keep it in mind when the date finally approaches. For example, if you have an upcoming event, sale or special occasion, you’ll want to make a Facebook post about it. Now, Facebook offers scheduled posts to help page owners better plan their overall strategy. When you create a scheduled post, you won’t have to worry about making a post at the time of the upcoming event, because the post will be uploaded automatically.
The new feature was introduced in May of 2012, so many business owners have already taken advantage of it. Scheduled posts actually allow Facebook page admins to spend more time engaging with their fans. When they don’t have to spend most of their day making posts, they can connect with fans by responding to comments and making comments of their own. Especially for people hired as social media managers, scheduled posts offer a way to plan the day more effectively and free up time to interact on social media sites.
Creating a scheduled post is easy, and it only requires a few extra steps beyond your usual post updates. After you’ve added the status or photo you’re looking to schedule, click on the clock icon in the lower left-hand corner of the post window. From there, you can choose the time, day, month, and year you’d like the post to show up on your timeline and in the newsfeed of your fans. Posts can be scheduled as far as six months into the future. As with your regular posts, you can also add language and location targeting to scheduled posts to reach fans more effectively.
There are many benefits to scheduled posts, and they can be a vital part of your Facebook strategy if used correctly. You can post more regularly by planning ahead, which will make your company page seem more valuable to existing and potential fans. In fact, you can even schedule a weekly post to appear at the exact same time on the same day of every week so that fans can expect your clever posts weekly. By using scheduled posts, your social media manager will spend less time each day writing out the content and more time interacting with fans and getting more attention for your social media pages. More attention on these pages will translate to more sales and more web traffic on your site.
Scheduled Posts are Not Linked to Twitter
If your Facebook is set up to automatically share every post on Twitter, this is especially important. When you create a scheduled post, it will not be posted to Twitter. Companies that take advantage of scheduled Facebook posts but don’t realize they aren’t linked to Twitter could get into trouble with this one when their Twitter feed suddenly becomes inactive. It’s important to stay relevant both on your Facebook and Twitter pages, so make sure you add supplemental Tweets to make up for the scheduled posts. Otherwise, your Twitter followers might soon lose interest.
Backdated Posts will Show Up in Your Fans’ Newsfeed
When you use scheduled posts on Facebook, you’ll have the option to backdate your post. In other words, you can create a new post that will have a time stamp from the past so it will look like you had posted it then. This is helpful if you want certain information on your Timeline from before you were active on Facebook. For example, you could make a post about a time you were featured in the local paper in 2009 before your company page was established. However, you need to remember that this post will still show up in the news feed of each fan. Though it will appear in the correct place on your Timeline, it will also show up as news as soon as it’s posted. Therefore, you should be careful about what you post. Fans might find it strange that you’re promoting past events.
Not Every Post Can be Scheduled
When you start planning your scheduled posts on Facebook, you might accidentally include a post that cannot actually be scheduled. It’s important to know which types of posts can be scheduled and which cannot. Links, photos, videos and regular status updates can all be posted automatically at a specified date and time. Photo albums, events, offers, questions and milestones cannot be scheduled. The feature is still relatively new on Facebook, so there’s a good chance these types of posts might have a scheduling option eventually, but for now they can only be posted in real time.
You Can’t Edit the Content of a Scheduled Post
Once you have created your status update and scheduled it to be posted in the future, you cannot edit the actual content of the post. You can change the date and time of upload, but the entire post will need to be deleted and remade if there is an error in the content. For that reason, you should be especially careful when creating scheduled posts so that you don’t waste time cancelling every one that has an error in the information or even grammatical errors. Be diligent in proofreading each scheduled post before it’s posted, and make sure each is double checked if you have a social media manager working on the Facebook page.
Scheduled posts are an excellent way to keep fans updated while also building a successful and effective social media strategy. Instead of waiting for things to happen, you can be organized and diligent in getting posts in order ahead of time and having them updated automatically. Your existing fans will be impressed by your Facebook diligence, and you could easily get more Facebook fans when others realize how valuable your social media content is. As long as you’re careful about scheduled posts and avoid mishaps such as predicting future events incorrectly, the feature can be a vital tool to your overall Facebook strategy.