Scheduling posts

- There is a good chance, as you work with content, that you'll want to set up posts in advance. After all, maybe you know that there's a vacation coming up, or instead of releasing 10 pieces of content at once, you'd like to spread those out a little bit. Well, depending upon where you're posting, you have different alternatives. Let's start with a business page where you actually get the ability to schedule posts built right in. On Facebook, navigate to a page that you have the rights to. Once you're on a page that you have control over, you can click in the status version here, and you'll see the ability to create a post.

Now, I could take advantage of any of the tools that we normally use to stylize a post. Remember, there's a wide range of options here. Then, at the bottom here, before you click publish, if you click on the drop down, you'll see a few options. One is backdate. This allows you to set a post to have an earlier date, so if you forgot to publish something on a particular day, or you'll see the ability to save a draft if you want it to get reviewed by someone, or schedule.

So, for example, we can go forward in time. Maybe we know that our open house is July 9th, and I wanna set this to come out at 7:30 a.m. for our customers. There we go. And we can even say when we want it to stop being shown, so for example, maybe we wanna make sure that nobody sees it after five o'clock at night, so they don't come by. Now, when I click schedule, it actually will run between a certain start date and an end date without having to worry about remembering to go back and delete it when the event is over, because we don't wanna say stop by today and then have somebody see this three days later when the event isn't happening.

Now, when I click schedule, the piece of content is added. You'll see it listed at the top as a scheduled post, but the audience will not see it. If you wanna go back and look at it, you could click see post, and it will take you into the post and let you see what it's gonna look like. This will give you a list of all posts that you have, and in fact, you can click the create button here if you want to create multiple posts or upload videos or photos or other elements and then schedule those to trickle out over time.

Now, that's fine if you have access to a business page. If you're not using a service like this where you're using Facebook's business manager, there are third party tools. One of those tools is dlvr.it. This allows you to connect and then publish up to multiple websites. You can use their free version of their plan to publish to a few websites or destinations, and if you've got multiple different sites that you manage, then you'll want to use one of their paid plans. This allows you to take an RSS feed, for example, and set something up to publish automatically, so you could take the feed of your blog and then target it to go to multiple locations, which works well.

Additionally, services like Hootsuite, besides allowing you to take an RSS feed, also allow you to take other content. You can go through and create custom posts and schedule those posts in advance, or even download an Excel spreadsheet and then populate it with several posts and upload it back. Once that content is made live, you will see that indicates that it came via Hootsuite. An additional benefit with some of these third party services is that they allow for tracking links and can generate detailed reports.

Whether you're using a business page with the built in tools or wanna take advantage of some third party solutions, using a scheduling service can really spread your content out so you don't have content bombs where you're dropping lots of content and then big gaps. Make sure you take the time to really strategize here and get a more even delivery pace.