I work with all kinds of different clients, but increasingly, a whole swag of them have a Facebook business page, and complain that they don’t have time to update it as regularly as I’m advising them too. In the past, I’ve advised them to use scheduling sites like Hootsuite, but in most cases, I can already see their eyes glazing over as I’m explaining how it works, and I can see them thinking – *another* site I have to remember how to log in to?
Thankfully, Facebook seems to have figured this out and have implemented a reasonably workable solution. It’s not perfect and it’s a bit cumbersome but it works (nearly all of the time …) and the post comes out looking how you want it to.
You can now schedule posts from within Facebook – and that means posts with images, links or just simple status updates – for up to a year ahead. This means you don’t have to log in to Facebook twice every day to post something, and you can sit down for a half hour or so at some stage during your week and schedule content for the days ahead (or up to a year ahead, if you’re super-keen!). If this sounds like something you need to try, here are some instructions:
1. Log in to your Facebook account and “Use page as …[your business page]” from the drop-down arrow at the top right of your screen.
2. Click in the “What’s on your mind?” box on your page profile and create a post as normal (add a photo, a link, write a status update).
3. Behold the magic schedule button: this small clock that appears at the bottom left corner of the status update box. Click it!
4. This part is the cumbersome bit, but it works – choose the year, then the month, then the day, then the hour, then the minute (I did say it is cumbersome!). You can spread our your content across the week and also try to post it at the optimal times for your “likers” to see it.
5. Ta-da! Done! And you have no more excuses for not putting out some at least semi-regular updates on your Facebook business page.
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