As much as I complain about Facebook, it really does drive traffic to my blog, so I’m not about to leave it any time soon. One thing I do really like about Facebook is its scheduling feature. It makes my life a hundred times easier–I set aside one day of the week to do research and to schedule up my Facebook posts on my Page for the week.

Facebook has had this feature for quite some time, but they have just recently changed it, so I felt like this post was worth repeating.

First off, this trick ONLY works on a Facebook business page. Facebook doesn’t supply a tool to schedule posts to your personal page. You can use third-party apps to do that, like Hootsuite, but IMHO, you should not.

Here’s how to Schedule Facebook Posts:

1. On your page, create a new status update. This can be whatever you like: a plain text status update, a link update, or a photo/image update.

2. Instead of hitting the blue “post” button, pull down the arrow right beside it. You’ll get three options: schedule post, backdate post or save draft.

3. Select schedule post. A pop-up box will appear with a date and a time. When you click on the date, a calendar will appear, allowing you to choose a date from the calendar. Once you’ve chosen your date, you can then choose the time of day you want it to post, and AM/PM.

4. Hit the blue “Schedule” button, and you’re done! Your post will automatically go live at the time you’ve set.

Some considerations:

If you need to reschedule your post for some reason, you’ll find all your scheduled posts listed just below the blank new status update box that is always at the top of your page. Click the blue link, and it will take you to your sheduled posts. To reschedule a post, simply pull down the arrow in the top, right-hand corner of that post, an it will give you the options.

This version of Facebook Scheduler is still buggy. I’ve often had problems scheduling posts if I just click on the clock part of the scheduler and try typing in the time I want with my keyboard. If you also have this problem, go back and click on the calendar, then use the tab key to move over to the clock. You should be able to change the numbers that way. One other thing I don’t like about this version is that every time you schedule a new post, it defaults back to the current day on the calendar. An older version of the scheduler remembered the last date you scheduled a post for.

Backdating and saving: you can also use this exact same method to back-date your posts. You may want to use this option when you are, for example, creating a brand new Facebook page, and you want it to look like you’ve been around longer than you actually have. Just remember, that, in order to do this, you’ll need to change the date your page was “born” in your settings. Facebook will only let you backdate your page to that date, and the date defaults to the day you created your page. The “drafts” option I can certainly see as being a useful tool, as well. You can put posts in there that, for example, you want to schedule up later, or allow multiple team members to draft up posts, and then have one lead person schedule them to go out.

Now, get out there and schedule some posts–you’ll look like a rock star. Also, while you’re at it, play around with different times of the day, and then check out your insights to see how your posts did. You can figure out the best time and day to publish to your page.