Facebook Page Scheduled Posts 101

One of the things I do for clients is manage content on their Facebook pages. Sometimes there are events and news items that can be or need to be post-dated but not all the time. I'm not going to get into that topic right now nor am I going to wax poetic about this other tool I use.

Here's a quick, step-by-step guide I just threw together after a couple of people I know said they weren't sure how to use it.

First, go to your FB page and make sure you're using the page as the page. You can do that up in the Admin Panel under "Manage." Then go to where you'd normally post a status update.

Simple enough, fill in what's on your mind like you normally would. Once you start typing this appears:

Click on the little clock icon.

If this is the first time you're using this feature, it will force you to add a year that your page/company was established. THEN, you can start scheduling your post. Click Add Year. Bear with me here...

THEN you have to select the month, the date, the hour (AM/PM) and minute THEN you click "Post." Note: You have to schedule your posts no less than 10 minutes from whatever time it is at that moment. If you don't, an error message pops up and you have to start from scratch.

So there you have it, that's how you schedule posts on your Facebook page. Do I like it? Not really. A few reasons why I don't:

1) When I click on the "View Activity Log" button, I'm taken to a page that's logged absolutely nothing. I cannot find my activity log so even if I need to edit the message I just posted I can't. Not at the moment anyway, let's hope they're fixing this one. And sorry if you suddenly see a post from me that says "Test." Ignore it.

2) You can't see the post you just scheduled on your page's timeline after it's been posted. It'll show on the fan's timeline but if you try to look for it while using FB as your page, it's not there. This was as of yesterday so they may have fixed the glitch. We'll see in about 30 minutes.

UPDATE: You can see it now. Guess they've worked that out.

3) Why on earth would I schedule a status post to go out 2010 or 2011?? Those are the choices you're given when you first click on "Add year." If you see logic in this, feel free to explain it but I don't even know how that works because 2011 is not the future and this is for scheduling future posts, is it not? Baffling.

4) Why would I want to hide my post from my timeline? Wouldn't it be less tedious to just not post?

I would like to like it, and I'm glad FB has decided to add this option but there's a lot to work on and they really should have tested it before launching it as part of their new Facebook Page admin heirarchy of accessibility thing.That's my technical term for it.

However there are plenty of other apps and sites that let you schedule posts on Facebook that can do so successfully and pretty seamlessly, from Raven Tools to Hootsuite to whatever else you're probably already happy using. This seems to me to be another case of Facebook jumping on a functionality bandwagon a few years too late to try and get people to use their site more which, admittedly, I would love to do if they'd just get it to work properly. Somehow I don't see that happening too soon so I will be relying on third-party apps till that pig flies.