New Facebook Pages feature
One of the biggest frustrations of people managing one or multiple social media presences is when a major social networking platform like Facebook does not allow scheduling of messages, thus requiring live updates and reducing efficiency. Today, Facebook has announced that Page administrators may now schedule posts for the future, as well as add updates to the past, just as personal Timelines for users have offered since Facebook launched the Timelines.
Not only is this an effort to make consistent the features of Facebook offered across personal profiles, Pages, and Groups, it is one way that the company can cut out third party apps (like HootSuite, TweetDeck, etc.) as currently, the scheduling feature is limited to Facebook.com only.
Updates can now be scheduled up to six months in advance at 15 minute intervals each.
How to schedule posts into the future
Although it seems like it would be extremely obvious how to schedule a post on a Facebook Page into the future, but it is less than intuitive. To schedule a post into the future:
- Go to your Facebook Page and type out your update.
- Then, at the bottom of the status update, click the tiny grey clock icon.
- That will then produce a small blue link that says “Add year,” which you should click.
- If you have not told your Page what year your company was founded, it will make you do that first. Note: for us, when we went through this process, it lost our update and we had to start again.Â
- After you add the year (2012, of course), it will produce another small blue link, “Add month,” click and select.
- Then, another link will come up, “Add day,” “Add hour,” then “Add minute.”
- Schedule it into the future, and click the blue “Schedule” button when you are finished.
When you have completed a future status update, you will see a pop up similar to this:
Additionally, Facebook outlines permissions that admins can now set for other team members:
