You may have heard that last week Facebook started allowing posts on pages to be scheduled through Facebook itself, instead of a 3rd party app like Hootsuite. Here's a quick look at how, and why to use Facebook instead of a 3rd party app.

1. Create your post - status update or photo/video like you normally would. Instead of clicking "Post" click on the clock icon in the lower left hand corner of the post. This is the same procedure as if you've adding milestones or posts to your Timeline. Instead of selecting a past date and time, choose a future time and date.
    1a. When you 1st click on the clock "Year" will pop up. After you pick the year, "Month" will show up, and so on.
    1b. Facebook will only allow posts scheduled for more than 10-minutes into the future.
    1c. Facebook will only allow posts on the 10s... 1:00, 1:10, 1:20, 1:30...



2. Once the post is scheduled you can find it in your page's Activity Log. You access your Activity Log in your Admin Panel, "Edit Page" option. 



3. Here you can change the time of the post, publish now, or cancel the post. Scroll your mouse over the right side of the post to activate the drop down arrow. YOU CANNOT EDIT YOUR POST. This is still a horribly lacking non-feature of Facebook. 
 
 


4. What I learned today: After 3 scheduled photo posts, Facebook put the photos created a "photos" album. So my 3rd scheduled post didn't post on the wall as you normally would see it. It posted in an album and the previous two individual posts disappeared from the wall and ended up in this album post. Again, Facebook decides to do things for me that I don't care for it to do!

Until another photo is scheduled, I don't know if it will continue to just post in this album or also post on the wall as an independent post. I'll update this when I know. The post itself goes out to the walls of those who have "liked" us like any post would. It just looks different on our wall. We have a great amount of traffic to our wall, so this doesn't thrill me at all.

 


5. So why go through this effort and use Facebook - because Facebook wants all that you do on Facebook to involve only Facebook. Months and months ago little whispers were out there saying posts from 3rd party apps weren't being given as much reach a posts directly to Facebook. When EdgeRank Checker debuted I tried it out and found that indeed our 3rd party app posts were getting a smaller reach, but not by much. Then Timeline happened and the reach of all 3rd party posts took a tank.

This screen grab is from a post through Hootsuite done three days ago. Until yesterday the post wasn't even showing any reach statistics, and now as you see only a couple thousand saw this post. Normally all posts having anything to do with breaking weather news get a great response. This one, not so much.



 
Okay Facebook I do appreciate this schedule option. I do hope improvements are made - EDITING functions being #1 closely followed by postings on other minutes besides the 10s.