There are days when you barely have enough time to guzzle a cup of coffee between phone calls and appointments. There are other days when you have a solid couple of hours to dedicate to important projects – like managing your social media accounts. And yet you want to be posting regularly – even daily – to your Facebook Page. How do you make sure you are posting daily, even on those days where the urgent stuff completely shoves the important stuff out the window?
The answer is simple. Take advantage of Facebook’s built-in scheduling feature.
When you begin typing a status update, a little gray clock will appear at the bottom left corner of the update box.
Anytime before you click on the POST button, just click on that little clock. You can then select the year, the month, the day and the time you want your post to actually appear on your PAGE.
You can select a date up to 6 months out and select a time in increments of 10 minutes. This simple little feature is enormously powerful. Scheduling allows you to both plan ahead and work ahead in your social media management.
Plan Ahead
Scheduling works best if you keep a business schedule so that you know ahead of time where you will be. Take advantage of time management tools like iCloud, Mozilla Sunbird, or even Google Calendar. Find one that works for you and work it. You don’t have to be a crazy time expert, but you will find that spending an hour a week planning out the next 2 weeks will yield huge dividends in efficiency and effectiveness.
You will also want to create an editorial calendar for your Facebook Posts. Again, this doesn’t need to be fancy or complicated. You simply want to have a weekly or monthly plan for what you intend to post and when.
Work Ahead
Now that you know what you will be doing over the next few weeks, you can take advantage of Facebook scheduling. On those days where you can sit down at your desk for a block of time, dig in, do your research and decide what you want to post over the next few weeks and when you want to post it.
Then enter those posts into your Facebook Page and schedule them according to your editorial calendar. If your time at the desk is limited, prioritize to schedule the days that you know you will be out of the office. The idea is to get the most work done when you are able to do it. You don’t have to be a slave to the computer – you can now make the computer system serve your schedule.
Of course, you are still free to post spontaneously at any time. Let your fans know when you see something cool, or learn something they might appreciate. There is great value in posting on the fly from your smart phone or tablet. It gives your Page a sense of “up-to-dateness.”
Just make sure your content is relevant to your audience, as well as timely. People respond to your posts when they find value in them (even if that value is just entertainment). Use Facebook’s scheduling feature to make sure you can deliver that value in the most time-efficient manner possible.
