The best way to save time and avoid spending hours on Facebook is to schedule your posts. If you’re a small business, this is a great strategy to use so you can connect with your audience throughout the day without having to be glued to your Facebook page. It will look like you’re on Facebook all the time, which maybe you already are. The great thing is that you don’t have to be. Scheduling posts gives you the options to schedule a post within hours, minutes and within the current year.
Insights About Facebook Pages
Facebook page posts for businesses on average reach about 16% of their audience. A pretty stark stat. Recently Facebook has changed it’s algorithm to be not as favorable to posts with photos attached. Posts with just text can reach more of your audience. That being said, engagement on posts with images is higher than posts with text so it’s kind of a catch 22. Post between 3 – 5 times per day that’s spaced out throughout the day, not a blitskrieg type of posting that you see some of your friends do that feels like someone took a big Facebook dump and all you see in your feed is that persons posts. This is where scheduling posts comes in handy. You can pace yourself and post at key times when your audience is most likely to be checking their profile.
Strategy
Before diving into how to schedule your posts, you need to create a strategy about what you’re going to be posting about. Facebook and Twitter can have the feeling that the people on the other and are not real. The thing is, these are real people, for the most part. 
Your posts need to connect with them in an authentic way that is engaging and gives value to them. You can create offers, free tickets to events, highlight them on your Facebook page, etc. Sit down and figure out what you have to offer and write it all down. Then break it up into digestible sections.
Schedule Your Time
Your time is valuable and you’re probably really busy doing a bunch of different things. You post to Facebook or Twitter every once in awhile but often think of it as a chore rather than something you’re excited about doing. You know it’s important to your business of work and just don’t really see how it can generate interest and probably most importantly, customers. You might just really want to shut it all off, unplug and step away from the computer and social web. This is where scheduling your posts comes in handy and you can strategically set up a Facebook time so you can step away from your computer.
After you’ve created a strategy about what you want to post, the next step is creating time to write and schedule your Facebook posts. At first, set aside 30 minutes to an hour if you can manage. It can be morning, afternoon or evening. Find a time where you have time to sit and focus on your content.
Schedule Your Facebook Posts
Ok. Now that you’ve created a strategy and carved a little time to create your posts, it’s time to schedule them. It’s important that you have some interaction with Facebook each day so I recommend scheduling 3 – 5 posts for that day. If your carved out time is in the morning, schedule your posts for that day. If you’re scheduled time is in the evening, schedule your posts for the following day. It’s good to do this so your content is fresh and relevant. If you do have some event or something coming further out, you can through that in and schedule that as well.
It’s actually really simple to schedule your posts. It’s making the space and creating the content that’s the challenging part.
When you go to create a new post, you’ll see a little clock image in the bottom right corner of the post box. Click that. It will give you the year. Select the year. Then it will give you an option to select the month. Select the month. Then the day. Select the day. Then the hour. Select the hour. Then the minute (if you want). Then just press schedule and your finished. You can be out having lunch or go for that cave trip you always wanted to go on that you know has horrible cell phone reception and be posting Facebook updates while spelunking. How cool! (Take lots of pictures and remember your flash.)
Do you have a business, book or work you’re trying to promote using Facebook? If so, what was the most successful post in terms of interaction and feedback you received?
