Thursday Tutorials: How to Schedule Posts via Facebook

Note: There's an updated version of this article here.

Today's Thursday Tutorial is a guide showing how to Schedule Posts.  A follow up guide will show you how to access scheduled posts and change when they are posting or how to delete them.

For this guide, I'm using one of my fanpages for UO Home Decor, to demonstrate scheduling a post.

Access the page you wish to schedule a post for.  At the top it should say: "You are posting, commenting, and liking as YOUR PAGE NAME — Change to YOUR NAME".  If it doesn't say this and it has "You are posting, commenting, and liking as YOUR NAME — Change to YOUR PAGE NAME," click to change it to your page name - that way you are acting as the page admin.   Scroll down to where you post a status and click in it to type your post.

You should see these options below your status window area.

The button to the left, that looks like a clock, is the scheduler.  The button immediately to the right of that that looks like a pin is the location tool which allows you to put a location with a post.

Click on the clock icon and the following should appear:

This allows you to set a date and time for it to publish.

Click on the calendar to set the date.  Use the arrow keys to change the month, then just click on whatever date you want.

The date will auto-fill in and the calendar view will disappear once you've clicked on the date you want.  You can alter this information at any time, including after you hit the schedule button, but that will be covered in another tutorial.

If you click in the "Add a Time?" box, it will let you type in a number, then provide a drop down menu to select AM or PM and a specific time from.  It looks something like this:

Select the time you want. 

Now, if you click in the status box to write your post, the options above will disappear, but you will still see the "Schedule" button instead of the "Post" button.  You don't have to set up the time and date before you type your post, but I find it helps with not accidentally posting a post if you set the time up before you create the post.

Once you create the post, just hit Schedule and it's saved.  You can change between Status, Photo/Video and Offer/Event, but I suggest selecting what you want prior to scheduling it to help with efficiency.

So now that you know how to schedule posts, you may be asking why you want to schedule posts.  The answer is simple.  If you are busy with work or attending an event or on vacation, scheduling posts allow the posts to post for you without you having to worry about it.  You should still have some page admin checking things.  But it also allows you to plan some things out in advance and not have to worry about it each week - especially if you do weekly questions or memes.

Thursday Tutorials are a series of tutorials designed to help people who may not be as Facebook savvy as other people.  Some tutorials will be targeted towards newbies to the social media world, others will include tutorials for more advanced users.  Thursday Tutorials are written for the layman and are designed with everyone in mind.  You can find all the Thursday Tutorials by clicking on the Thursday Tutorials tag below.