Imagine this scenario: You have planned to post once a day on Facebook this week.
On Monday morning, you log in to Facebook and navigate to your company’s Facebook Page. You spend some time crafting the perfect post and wait for the supposed best time to post. You read that 3pm is a good time as people are taking a break from work and checking Facebook. So you wait…
At 2:55pm, you go back to the browser tab that has been opened since 10am. When the clock strikes 3pm, you hit “Publish”. Woohoo!
And then you repeat that for the next four days.
If that’s not too far from your day-to-day experience, I would love to suggest a simple tactic that can help you get better results and make you a better marketer…
Scheduling your Facebook posts.
Keen to find out more? Let’s read on.
Buffer can help you with Facebook scheduling, managing multiple Facebook Pages, and more. We would love for you to give it a try and see the difference.
3 benefits of scheduling your Facebook posts
You might be wondering, “the way I post on Facebook is just fine. Why do I have to change?” Well, here are three top benefits of scheduling your Facebook posts, compared with publishing it manually yourself.
(Oh, and if you are thinking that Facebook might penalize you for using a third-party tool, we’ll discuss that in just a moment.)
1. Maintain consistency and quality
The biggest benefit of scheduling your Facebook posts is to ensure that you’re posting consistently and to maintain the quality of your posts. Quantity and quality.
When you are scheduling your Facebook posts, you’re essentially planning ahead.
For example, on Monday, you plan out all five posts for the week. Because you’re scheduling the posts to be published automatically, you won’t miss posting something even if you are busy — consistency. And because you dedicate time to crafting your posts in advance (rather than thinking of something on the spot every time), you can create higher quality content — quality.
2. Reach a wider audience
Publishing a post on Facebook directly is mostly fine… until you want to post at a time outside of your working hours to reach your audiences at different times of the day. You might have to excuse yourself from a dinner just to hit the publish button. Or worse, wake up in the middle of the night to do that.
When you schedule your posts, your posts will be published automatically at your chosen times. Whether it’s 7pm or 2am, it’ll almost seem like you published it manually yourself.
This way, you’ll be able to reach more people around the world who are checking Facebook at various times of their day. This is especially helpful for businesses with an international audience but also businesses in places where the population is spread across several time zones (e.g. US and Europe)1.
3. Become more efficient
Finally, scheduling your Facebook posts can make you a better marketer.
According to the American Psychological Association, numerous studies have found that multitasking reduces one’s productivity. While switching between crafting a Facebook post and your other tasks for the day might not seem like much, research has found that “even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone’s productive time”.2
Just consider the things you can do if you get back that 40 percent of your time!3
Does Facebook penalize posts from third-party tools like Buffer?
While scheduling Facebook posts sounds attractive, many people have a concern once they research into scheduling…
Facebook doesn’t seem to like third-party tools.
It is often said that Facebook penalizes posts from third-party tools by showing the posts to fewer people organically than posts published directly on Facebook.
How true is that?
We recently did an experiment with Buffer, Hootsuite, and CoSchedule to see if that’s true. We found that there wasn’t a significant difference in reach whether we scheduled posts using a third-party tool or published posts directly on Facebook. Some scheduled posts from third-party tools even reached more people than the Facebook posts published directly on Facebook.
How to schedule Facebook posts with Buffer
So how do you schedule Facebook posts? There’re several methods.
Facebook itself offers a native feature that allows admins and editors to schedule posts to a Page or a Group. Here’s a quick guide from Facebook…
