This week, I have a couple of Facebook how-tos for you. Today, I’m going to show you how to schedule or back-date posts on your Facebook Fan (or business) page, and Thursday, I’ll show you how to install apps on your Facebook Page.
So. Why would you want to back-date or schedule a status update? Well, the other day I was going through my photo albums in an attempt to create space on my hard drive. I found some photos of my son when he was a baby, before I’d joined Facebook. I uploaded these photos to my personal account and back-dated them to the day they were taken. You can do similar things with your Facebook page. Got photos of the day your business opened? You can upload them and back-date them. Did you have a significant business milestone happen before you joined Facebook? You can share it on your page, and it will show up at the appropriate spot on your timeline.
In terms of future scheduling, you can set aside a half an hour or an hour per week to go through your RSS feeds and find interesting articles you want to share on your FB page. You can then take a few minutes to create a week’s worth of status updates and schedule them to go out over the week. Another option is that you could schedule your posts to go out at different times of the day during the week, and then check with your insights at the end of the week to see what time of day received the most likes and comments. If something comes up that is more pressing or important, you can just cancel your scheduled post for that day.
And here’s how you do it:
Hi Rebecca!
I just started to watch this video, but it’s not the video that relates to the article….:o(
I’m helping with a Facebook page for a charity supporting Cambodia projects and am going to share the postings with the lady on the ground in Cambodia. So, just trying to figure out best days and times we should each post. Any tips?
Nicky.
Weird. For some reason, YouTube grabbed the entire playlist instead of that specific video. I’m going to see if I can fix it.
In response to your question, I would ask: where is your main audience coming from? You should post at high traffic times so that the people who use your page the most are seeing your posts when they are online. Make sense??
Thanks for sharing, Rebecca!
I didn’t know about scheduling in FB. Just got Hootsuite and did a search for how to schedule FB posts and landed here. This online biz thing is new territory for me and your info just saved me time and effort. Very much appreciating that, lovely lady!
Hi! Great content! I tried to schedule a post for the future and it doesn’t seem to be an option. Am I missing something or did the rules change since you cut this video? Thanks, I appreciate your guidance.
Are you on a Facebook page, or on a personal account? Scheduling only works for business pages.
Hello, and thanks for the tutorial. I just created a fan page and would like to backdate posts as I move content from elsewhere. However, I can’t figure out how to backdate to before the date I created the page. When I’m looking at the drop-down menu of years for backdated (on either Status or Milestone posts) it only gives me the option of this year.
Because you had said you were backdating your photos to before you’d joined Facebook, I wondered if you’d found a way to successfully do this. If so, please let us know some details!
Yep, you just need to change the “date you joined Facebook.”
Log in to your page, and on your admin panel, click on “edit page info.” Under the “general” tab, go four down, look for the one that says “start info.” Go over on the right, there’s a hyperlink that says “edit.” Click that, and you can backdate your page for whatever date you’d like. You’ll then be able to backdate posts to any time up to the date you chose.
Thank you so much! Totally got me fixed up!