If you set up a Facebook page with us two weeks ago, then you’ll have seen since then that there are a number of helpful tools on the page which let you make the most of it.
Today we’re talking about the ‘Publishing Tools’ section, and the different screens there are to help you manage your standard text posts, links etc.
Published posts
When you first click the ‘Publishing Tools’ tab, it brings you to a list of your recently published posts, and gives you a summary of the performance of each post so far. This gives you a quick way of checking which posts are more popular than others, which is useful information to help you guide the kind of content you’ll develop in future.
If you want to know more details about a particular post, click on that post title to bring up the Post Details screen, which breaks down the kinds of interaction people had with your post, as well as showing you the full post as it appears in the news feed.
Drafts
In the menu on the left you’ll see a number of options – Drafts is the third one down. This is an extremely useful place to start firing down all your ideas for Facebook posts, even if you’re not quite ready to publish or schedule them. You can check what your content looks like, if you wrote it else where, and make sure the right pictures are showing up from a linked article, as well as checking for typos and making sure the text isn’t too long.
Any content you’re not totally happy with can hang out here until you’ve polished it to perfection.
Clicking on an existing draft shows you a preview in desktop and mobile, so you can make sure it’s optimised for both, and you have a range of options for editing, publishing, scheduling, and deleting drafts as well.
Scheduled Posts
This is, without a doubt, the most useful tool Facebook as included. You’re a busy entrepreneur, so of course you don’t have the time to be hovering over the ‘Publish’ button of your content. But you also know that certain publishing times are better than others at reaching your customers. Scheduling gives you the best of both worlds – so you can create content as it suits you, and have it go live automatically when it best suits your audience.
A second convenient features lets you schedule posts to disappear from news feeds after a certain time – it’ll still be on your page, but Facebook will stop putting it up in your audience’s news feeds when you tell it to. In particular this might be useful if you’re running a time limited offer, or if you publish regularly and don’t want your posts to overlap each other.
Of course the real reason you should love scheduling is because it lets you batch produce content – you can do all your research and create your posts for the week and have them scheduled and ready to go! Facebook will send you a notification to confirm your content has been published, and it will even send you notifications to highlight if a post is doing better compared to your other posts. So you don’t have to worry about forgetting what’s gone up either, and you can get involved in the conversation after the fact, if you need to.
Expiring posts
Despite the fact that it’s under the ‘Posts’ section, not the ‘Videos’ section, the expiring posts tool refers only to video content, and so we’ll cover this next week in our post on Facebook’s video publishing tools.
Your stories
Have you tried scheduling a post yet? How much time do you spend preparing content each week? We’d love to hear your views and ideas in the comments.
