I am taking this week off to refocus, so no new posts for you. However, I’m pulling out some of my “greatest hits.” 

This post gets hits every day–despite the fact that it’s from late 2012. The Facebook scheduler is something I use on a daily basis. A couple of things have changed since I originally wrote this post, though.

In order for you to back-date posts, you need to first make sure that the date your FB page was created is well in the past. You do this by logging into your admin panel, and then clicking on edit page–>update page info–>and then click on the “page info” tab. The fourth option down is “start info.” You can edit the date you started your FB page by clicking on the “edit” option on the far right. 

Now, when you write a status update, you’ll see a little clock in the lower, left-hand corner. When you click on it, it will give you the option to schedule your posting into the future. If you pull down the arrow beside “schedule post,” it will give you the option to backdate.

 Originally posted October 30, 2012

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: