Keith Nallawalla
Facebook has been unveiling a lot of new features on a regular basis in the past few months leading up to their IPO. One new feature in their post IPO updates has been Post Scheduling for Business Pages. This update seems long overdue and it is surprising Facebook never got around to doing it earlier since there have been third-party apps allowing this Facebook feature for quite some time.
What does this mean for small businesses? It is not uncommon for a small business page on Facebook to be managed poorly. Either by either too little attention or too much attention in short bursts, but then no activity for a while. A key problem here is that it was hard for staff to actually find time to get onto Facebook to post things at the relevant times of the day.
It is no secret that certain times of the day get better responses from different markets. Now that scheduling is available without worrying about a third party tool, small businesses can attempt to post more efficiently. I refer to small businesses as a lot of bigger businesses outsource their social media or have dedicated staff to take care of it. This does not mean that small businesses should simply schedule all their posts at the start of the week and then not check into Facebook again until the following week, because you will want to monitor any comments and respond to anything. You will also want to peek at your analytics to see if anyone is actually engaging with your posts.
To schedule a post, make a new post and click on the little clock icon in the bottom left corner.
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Then you can choose the time and date to post it. It allows you to post retrospectively (as you could previously) or schedule to the future. It is quite straightforward, asking for the year, then the month, day and minute, but you do not have to be so specific for retrospective posts. For scheduled posts, you should be more particular though. The minutes are only in 10-minute increments but that shouldn’t be a huge issue.
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Once it is done it will tell you when it will be posted. Just click Close after this appears. To change or delete the post, visit the activity log as described above.
