Scheduling content is a great way to plan your marketing strategies in advance, lighten your team's manual task workload, and share your content roadmap with your coworkers.
When scheduling content in Social Media Management, you can choose a date and time for your posts to be published. Social Media Management takes care of the rest by automatically pushing your content live at the scheduled time.
In this article:
Scheduling a post
Scheduling content is available for all networks supported in Publish.
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While creating a post in the Publish Editor, scroll down the left-hand section of the Editor and click the Schedule section.
- (Optional) Use the Best times to post tool pick the optimal date and time to publish for engagements, reach, impressions, video views, or plays (Instagram only). These recommendations are based on your channel's historical data.
- Select a date and a time to publish your post. Your local time zone is used by default, but you can choose another from the drop-down list.
- Once the post is ready, click the Schedule button under the post preview.
Alternatively, you can also schedule a post by clicking on a future date in the Publish Calendar and clicking Add Post. All scheduled posts can be found in the Scheduled section of Publish.
Once your scheduled post is published, the creator and approver of the post will receive an email notification.
Note:
A scheduled post will only appear on the chosen network once published. Scheduling on a native network and scheduling in Social Media Management are separate, except for the Facebook native scheduling feature described below.
Best times to post
The Best times to post feature pulls data from Measure to show when your posts typically perform best across five metrics: engagements, reach, impressions, video views, and plays (Instagram only).
- Best times to post data is unique to each channel, and it is based on the channel's past six months of content data.
- The tool will display the top ten recommended post times. If fewer than ten options are available based on the data, we will provide as many options as we can.
- Times will be displayed in the timezone selected in the Scheduler. If no timezone has been selected, we will use your default timezone.
Tip:
Your best times to post data can also be applied to dates beyond those shown in your top ten. For example, if your top suggested time is next Monday at 12:00 PM, that means the following Monday at 12:00 PM will also be the best time to post for that week—Mondays at 12:00 PM will always be your best time to post until/unless your data in Measure changes.
Pushing content to the Facebook queue
You can schedule your content in Social Media Management and have it show in the native Facebook scheduler as well. This is useful if you're working with a publishing flow that includes ad creation in the Facebook Business Manager.
All you need to do to schedule a post natively is to check the Add to Facebook queue box under the scheduling options in the Publish post editor. Posts can be scheduled up to 28 days in advance using the Facebook queue option.
Note:
If a post is scheduled natively on Facebook, it can’t be edited in Social Media Management anymore. Changes to the post must be made in Facebook and won't be reflected in Social Media Management until the post is published. A natively scheduled post can still be deleted from the Facebook queue in Social Media Management.
Unscheduling and reverting a post to draft
If necessary, you can unschedule a post to return it to Drafts for further editing.
Note:
This feature is only available to Social Media Management users with a user role of Editor or above.
- From Publish, click the Scheduled section under the Content menu and open your post.
- Scroll down to the Schedule module in the post editor.
- Click the X icon to the right of the displayed date and time.
- Changes are saved automatically. Click Back or navigate to any other area of the platform.
Your post will now be found in Drafts again without a date and time. By default, other drafts containing dates and times will appear first in the list of drafts. Look below these to find your new, unscheduled draft.
Note:
Please bear in mind that posts scheduled to the Facebook queue cannot be edited or unscheduled in Social Media Management.
Scheduling in bulk
With the exception of X (Twitter), which only allows publishing to one channel at a time, you can schedule a post to be published to as many channels at once as you like.
- Click Create post in the upper left corner of the Publish module.
- Select the network and channels you'd like to schedule your posts to. The total number of selected channels will be displayed in the Summary upper right. Click Create Facebook post.
- From here, you can open the dropdown menu at the top of the post preview to preview your post on each channel.
Note:
If you edit a post on one channel (text, media attachments, labels, approvers, etc.) the changes will carry over to the other channels, too. If you want to customize the post for each channel, please create separate posts instead. You can use the Copy tool to streamline the process.
Rescheduling or unscheduling in bulk
Need to unschedule multiple posts or shift their scheduled time? Instead of rescheduling each post individually, you can save time by visiting Publish > Scheduled and adjusting the scheduled status for multiple posts in bulk. This allows you to move the scheduled time for your selected posts (e.g. by a certain amount of hours or days) or send them back to Drafts.
For more information, visit our full article on rescheduling and unscheduling posts in bulk.