How to schedule a post to Facebook
Want to know how to schedule a post to Facebook? Social media scheduling is the key to creating an effective and engaging social media strategy. A Facebook posting schedule makes your workday less stressful and reduces the risk of frantic last-minute posts with typos and errors.
The public relations team at Adoni Media understands the importance of creating social media schedules to ensure consistent messaging and content. Here are some of their tips to help you become a Facebook scheduling pro.
Audit content
This step is crucial before you start building your posting schedule. You need to have a full understanding of what your existing social media account looks like, and who are your key demographics. As each social media channel optimises different audiences and content, you should outline the goals specifically for Facebook. Use Facebook analytics to find out your key demographics and the type of content they engage with the most. You can also use analytics to find out the best days to post and which times. Use the audit to determine who is responsible for scheduling and planning content.
Conduct a competitor and industry analysis
Have a look to see what types of content your competitors are posting and what their Facebook pages look like. Determine what has worked and what hasn’t and think about what strategies you can adopt for your own business. There are heaps of social media monitoring tools that you can use to do this. It is also important to look more broadly at industry trends and popular hashtags to see what topics people are currently interested in.
Decide how often to post content
This decision will be based on the research and analysis you have done, and your team members’ availability. There is no rule for how often to post so it’s important to gain insight into how your competitors post. Whatever you decide, make sure it’s consistent and meaningful. Don’t post every day if you aren’t posting quality and engaging content.
Decide when to post content
Similarly, this decision will be based on the insights you gain from research. Social media monitoring and analytics tools will be able to tell you the optimal times to post to reach your specific audience. The ideal time to post will differ based on a number of factors and is likely to change as the way audiences consume content shifts.
Decide what content you will post
One of the biggest parts of creating a posting schedule is determining your content mix. Here are a few standard content mixes that businesses like to use:
- The social media rule of thirds
- One-third of posts promote your business and focus on sales or conversions
- One-third of posts share industry curated content
- One-third of posts involve building a personal connection with an audience.
- The 80-20 rule
- 80% of posts inform, educate or entertain your audience
- 20% of posts directly promote your business and focus on sales or conversions.
Create a template
Now that you’ve done the prep work, it’s time to create a social media posting schedule template. There are many ways to create a template but using Excel or a table in Word is the easiest. This template should be set out like a calendar and will include the day and date of posts, the social media channel they will be posted on, the image or video, a caption and the time it will be posted.
Find a scheduling program
Hootsuite and Later are two of the most common social media scheduling tools businesses use. Facebook also has its own built-in scheduling system that is easy to use, and you can gain instant analytics on each post.
Have a social media strategy you need implemented, or need advice on how to plan a social media strategy, contact us
