The Case for Scheduling Facebook Posts

Facebook Functionality
If you are an administrator on your brand’s Facebook Page, by now, you are probably aware that Facebook implemented functionality to allow you to schedule Facebook posts on your Page. The scheduling tool is a lot more cumbersome than other scheduling tools such as Hootsuite, but I’ve read that Facebook places a higher degree of importance on posts scheduled directly thru Facebook, so accept that it is unwieldy and move on.

To Schedule or Not to Schedule….THAT is the Question
There are stalwart experts in both thought camps:

1. Social media is all about engaging, thus all of your posts should be spontaneous vs.
2. It’s more efficient to schedule posts in advance

My perspective is that you really should combine both spontaneous and scheduled posts for an effective engagement strategy.

The Case for Spontaneous
When you’ve just had an amazing recording session and you’re riding an emotional high from the experience, it’s a good time to tweet about your excitement or post a status update on Facebook. It connects you with your fans on a more personal level, which is the ultimate goal of social media—to establish a personal connection with someone you might not otherwise be able to connect with personally. It allows your fans to share in your excitement and show their support for your accomplishment.

The Case for Scheduling
On the other hand, you may come across 3 articles on topics you know your fans will like in a ten-minute period of time. However, if you publish them all immediately, it clogs their newsfeed a bit, which is a little like spamming your followers. Additionally, the messages may be overlooked, because as users we tend to overlook repetitive posts by the same person/page in a short period of time.

Instead, publish the first one immediately, and schedule the other two for later in the day or later in the week, to allow your readers an opportunity to receive the information in smaller chunks, which is more likely to result in more of your followers desiring to read all of the information you’ve shared with them.

Scheduling Facebook Status Updates
If you haven’t yet figured out how to schedule a post, here’s a quick overview:

1. Begin by clicking on one of the icons to create a new post.
2. Fill in the information, upload a picture, etc., as if you were going to post immediately.
3. Instead of clicking “Post”, click on the clock icon in the lower right corner of the window.
4. Select the year, month, day, hour, and minute that you want the post to be published.
5. Click “Schedule”.  (Note the “Post” button changed to “Schedule” when you clicked on the clock icon.)

To view all of your scheduled posts, select “Edit Page”, “Use Activity Log”.

Note that you can edit the date or cancel the posts that are scheduled by selecting the pull down arrow to the right of the post.

What is your perspective on scheduling posts?