How To Schedule Facebook Posts: 2 Easy Methods
Want to learn how to schedule Facebook posts ahead of time? You’re in the right place.
In this post, I’ll show you two easy ways to schedule posts to your Facebook page using Meta Business Suite or a third party tool (SocialBee).
We’ll start by looking at the differences between them. Then, I’ll walk you through each method step-by-step.
If you stick around until the end, I’ll also share a few advanced scheduling tips and tricks that can help you save even more time and improve your strategy.
Why schedule Facebook posts in advance?
First, let’s talk about why it’s always a good idea to schedule posts to Facebook ahead of time, as opposed to manually publishing them yourself.
Here are the main benefits:
- It saves time. It’s much more efficient to schedule multiple Facebook posts in advance than to post them manually. You can further streamline your workflow by cross-posting to multiple pages at once, setting up recurring or category-based posting schedules, etc. And all that time you save can be redirected to other social media efforts.
- It improves consistency. Scheduling tools help improve consistency as you can set up a regular posting schedule and ensure that your posts will always go out at the right time, every time. In contrast, if you publish your posts manually, there’s always the risk that you’ll forget to post something at the time you planned.
- It allows you to post around the clock. No more setting your alarm clock to 3 AM so you can share that Reel when your international audience is most active. Scheduling tools allow you to easily post at any time of day without lifting a figure.
- It offers strategic insights. Both of the Facebook scheduling tools we’ll look at in this post offer strategic insights such as ‘best time to post’ suggestions. These insights help you to optimize your strategy so your posts get more reach and engagement.
- It improves cohesion. By scheduling posts, you can map out your entire Facebook content calendar far in advance, ensuring a balanced mix of content types that align with your brand’s goals. This strategic foresight helps create a unified narrative across your posts, making your overall message more impactful.
SocialBee vs Meta Business Suite
There are two ways to schedule Facebook posts.
You can use Facebook’s native scheduling tools in Meta Business Suite. Alternatively, you can use a third-party scheduling tool like SocialBee.
Meta Business Suite has the advantage of being free. However, it can only schedule posts up to 29 days in advance. If you want to schedule posts months ahead of time, we’d recommend SocialBee instead.
SocialBee also lets you schedule and post content to other social media platforms in addition to Facebook—like TikTok, YouTube, Twitter (X), Threads, etc.—at the same time. In contrast, Meta Business Suite only works for Instagram and Facebook.
And SocialBee has a lot of other powerful tools to help you create and schedule posts more efficiently, like content recycling, category-based posting schedules, built-in design and content curation tools, a powerful AI assistant, and much more. You don’t get any of that on Meta Business Suite.
Overall, SocialBee is a much better solution for most users.
Click here to try SocialBee for free.
The only time I’d recommend Meta Business Suite would be if you don’t want to pay a monthly subscription fee, you’re focusing exclusively on Facebook and Instagram, and you don’t mind only scheduling up to one month in advance.
How to schedule Facebook posts with Meta Business Suite
Here’s how to schedule posts to Facebook through Meta Business Suite in three simple steps
Step 1: Open Meta Business Suite
First, open up Meta Business Suite.
You can do this by clicking on Meta Business Suite from your Facebook Business Page in your desktop browser or on the Facebook mobile app.
Alternatively, head to business.facebook.com and log in to connect your account.
Step 2: Choose a date in the calendar
From the sidebar, click Planner to open up the content calendar.
You can switch between weekly or monthly calendar views using the tabs at the top.
Recommended posting times will be highlighted in the calendar. These are based on when your followers were most active in the last seven days.
Choose a date you want to share a post on and click the + icon. Then, click on the post type you want to schedule (post, Reel, or Story)
Step 3: Create your post
Select the Facebook (or Instagram) page that you want to schedule the post to in the drop-down menu at the top.
Next, add the photo or video you want to share in your post in the Media section and enter the text for your post under Post details. You can also add feelings/activities, buttons, A/B test variations, etc. as needed.
Under Scheduling options, make sure Set date and time is toggled on and that the date is correct.
Then, select the time you want to share the post. You can click Active times for suggestions based on when your audience is active.
Once you’re finished, hit Schedule, and you’re done! You can view, delete, edit, and manage all scheduled posts in your Planner.
How to schedule Facebook posts with SocialBee
With SocialBee, you can schedule multiple posts to Facebook and all your other socials as far in advance as you want.
You can schedule posts individually, in bulk, or by category. First, I’ll just show you the basic process of how to schedule posts individually. We’ll come back to those other features later.
Step 1: Connect your Facebook account
First, sign up for SocialBee and log in to your account.
Click here to sign up and start a free trial.
When you first log in, you’ll be prompted to connect all your social media accounts.
Follow the instructions to connect your Facebook page and any other socials you want to manage or schedule posts to.
Step 2: Create a post
Once you’ve connected your account, you’ll be brought to your dashboard. Click the Add Post button at the top to open the Facebook post scheduler.
Select your Facebook page and any other social accounts that you want the post to be published on by clicking the relevant icons at the top of the page.
Then, enter the text for your post in the box underneath, and click Add a photo or video to add media as needed.
There’s a built-in AI tool that you can use to generate the text, hashtags, and even images for your post. Just click the AI button and enter a prompt to use it.
You can also click on the Canva, Giphy, and Unsplash icons to create/source visuals and add them to your posts in a couple of clicks.
If you’re sharing the same Facebook post to your accounts on other social networks, you can click Customize for each profile to edit the visuals or caption for each platform.
Step 3: Choose when to post
Underneath the When to post section, click Add a posting time.
This will open up a pop-up calendar. Choose the date/time you want the post to be shared in the calendar, then click Apply.
Note: Suggested times based on your historical post performance (i.e. when your audience is most active and engaged) will be highlighted in yellow.
If you want to share the same post multiple times, you can keep clicking Add a posting time and adding new dates/times as needed.
You’ll see a few other options in this section including the option to choose a category, re-queue after posting, expire post, etc. but ignore those for now—we’ll come back to them later.
Once you’re done, click Save post and you’re finished. SocialBee will automatically publish it at the right time.
You can click on Next Posts from your dashboard to see a list of your scheduled posts and delete/edit/manage them.
Advanced Facebook scheduling options
That’s the easiest way to schedule a single post on SocialBee.
However, there are some advanced features you can use to bulk schedule Facebook posts more efficiently.
Let’s take a look at some of them.
Create a category-based posting schedule
Instead of scheduling each post one by one, SocialBee gives you the option of creating a recurring posting schedule around content categories.
This is much more efficient and can substantially improve your productivity and organization.
First, open up the Content tab by clicking it in the sidebar. From here, you can add multiple content categories by clicking the Create Category button.
Categories are like buckets of posts grouped around a common theme. For example, you might have one category for all your Funny Facebook memes, another one for your Reels, and another one for promotional posts that advertise your products/services.
After you’ve created a category, you can fill it out with posts. Just click View posts > Add post to this category. Then, rearrange them to choose the order you want them to get published.
Next, open the Schedule Setup tab from the sidebar. You’ll see a weekly calendar broken up into days and hourly time slots.
Click on a time slot, then choose a category from the drop-down menu, and SocialBee will automatically share a post from that category at that time/day every week.
For example, you could set it up so that SocialBee shares promotional posts every Monday at 6 PM, and funny Reels every Tuesday at 3 PM, etc.
Use social media copilot to build your schedule
Social media copilot is SocialBee’s built-in AI assistant, and it’s incredibly powerful.
It can plan your entire posting schedule and generate multiple posts from scratch in minutes.
First, open it up in the sidebar. Then, enter answers to its questions in the chat box. It’ll ask you about your business, audience, goals, etc.
Based on the information you enter, it’ll come up with some relevant content categories, and schedule them at the optimal times for your audience.
After that, it will generate a bunch of posts to fill each category with (including images and visuals), so that you constantly have plenty of content in your pipeline.
You hardly have to do anything. It’s completely hands-off.
Set up recurring posts (content recycling)
With SocialBee, you can automatically re-queue your evergreen Facebook posts so that they get shared over and over again until they expire.
To do so, click on a content category, then open the Default Settings tab.
Next, click the button next to Re-queue after posting.
SocialBee will now automatically re-add all posts it publishes in that category at the bottom of the queue so that they continually get re-shared again at a later date. You can also set an expiration date/time, at which point SocialBee will stop re-queueing them.
If you don’t want to recycle every post in a category, you can turn on Re-queue after posting for individual posts in the post composer.
Facebook scheduling tips
Before we wrap up, here are a few extra tips to help you optimize your posting schedule so that your Facebook posts reach more people and get more engagements.
- Post at the right time. Base your schedule around your audience. The goal is to share posts when your followers are most likely to engage with them to maximize their performance. SocialBee and Meta Business Suite can both recommend posting times personalized to your audience—make sure you use them.
- Set up approval workflows. If you work in a team, you might want to set up an approval workflow. For example, in SocialBee, you can set it up so that team members submit posts as drafts and you or your social media manager has to manually approve each of them before they’re published.
- Don’t plan too far ahead. You can schedule Facebook posts months in advance with SocialBee. However, if you schedule too far ahead, you run the risk that your posts won’t be relevant by the time they’re published. Topics that are popular today might not be in a few months. Likewise, memes and audio that are trendy right now might be stale and overdone later.
- Keep a close eye on your analytics. Regularly cast an eye over your analytics to see how your posts and content categories are performing. If you find that posts published at a certain time tend to underperform, mix it up. Feed what you learn back into your strategy.
Final thoughts
That concludes my guide on how to schedule posts on Facebook.
To recap, the best way to schedule Facebook posts is with SocialBee. You can schedule Facebook posts individually or create a recurring posting schedule based on content categories. Plus, schedule other social media posts from the same place.
Alternatively, you can schedule Facebook posts individually through Meta Business Suite for free. However, you can only schedule up to 29 days in advance if you go down this route, and only to Facebook and Instagram (other social networks aren’t supported).
While you’re here, check out these Facebook giveaway ideas to grow your audience. You can set up your giveaways using a social media contest app.
You might also want to read my beginner’s guide to building a social media strategy. And find out how Facebook compares to other networks in my data-driven ranking of the leading social media platforms.
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