You wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. You are sure you’ve forgotten something but you can’t remember what it is. You rack your brain and then it hits you. You were supposed to send out a Facebook post and you have completely forgotten about it.
Sound familiar? Ok, maybe you’re not waking up in the middle of the night in sheer panic but every entrepreneur has forgotten to add a post that they meant to post. (A bit of forseshadowing . . . maybe you should automate your Facebook posts instead?)
Social media is a must-have marketing tool for almost every business these days but let’s face it, social media content creation and management takes time.
When you are building a business, you have one million things you are accomplishing and social media can slip through the cracks. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Social media automation is more than just a fad. It’s a tool that enables businesses of large and small to create, manage and publish social media content on a regular basis. We’ll show you how to automate Facebook posts so you can rest easy without any social media nightmares.
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Why Should You Automate Facebook posts?
Keeps you consistent
Being a business owner means you are busy. We get it. Even though you know that social media is incredibly important, it can easily end up at the end of your to-do list. Unfortunately, one post a week just doesn’t cut it in the digital age. You need consistent posts. Social media automation is your ticket to consistency without spending all your time logged onto Facebook.
Reach multiple time zones
If you’re a digital business, such as an e-commerce business, course creator, or blogger, then there’s a good chance you have audiences across the United States or you have the potential to reach audiences across the world. If you only posted in the Eastern Time Zone, you could be missing your ideal customer who lives in Australia. Luckily, you can automate posts so that they reach your entire audience, even if the audience is awake while you are asleep!
Gives you more free time to actually engage with your audience
Social media is all about being social. It’s a balance of sharing content and engaging with content. However, it’s tough for any small business owner to find time to create excellent content and engage with followers. Automating Facebook posts and scheduling social media content frees up your time so you can focus on engaging with your growing community.
You can automate Facebook posts on the Facebook platform or you can use a social media scheduling tool like Edgar to do it for you.
Using Edgar makes it much easier to schedule your posts than posting directly to Facebook for a few reasons.
Edgar recycles your content so it will automatically repost your content to your page so you never run out of posts. This will end up saving you so much time in the long run because when you automate Facebook posts on the platform, you post it and it’s gone. But in Edgar, your posts stay in your library. This means that if you’re busy or can’t find time to post on a specific week, Edgar will pull from your library and automatically reshare your content.
You can also create different variations of your post so you can test content to see what works best with your audience, keep your feeds fresh and increase engagement. Edgar will even create auto variations of your content for you! Just add in a link and Edgar will pull up to four quotes from the content of the link you’ve shared. Watch a video of auto-variations in action here.
If you’ve ever sat staring at the screen trying to think up the absolute best post but end up just daydreaming about anything else, then you are going to love this feature! Seriously, some of our customers are saying it’s just like magic!
You can also categorize your content in Edgar which will help you to provide a much better experience on your social media page. If you only post using Facebook, you probably won’t be able to see or understand any strategy when you look back at what you’ve created. But with categories, your content will be balanced and strategic.
Also, when you post using Edgar, you can schedule all your social media content from the same place. This will save you lots of time from hopping to one social site to the next!
Here’s a quick how-to for automating Facebook posts on Facebook and in Edgar.
How To Automate Facebook Posts Natively On Facebook
- Write your post in the “Create Post” box
- Below your post, click the “Share Now” dropdown
- Select the second option “Schedule”
- Select the date and time you want your post to publish
- Select “Schedule”
If you want to see your scheduled Facebook posts on Facebook, you can click over to the “Publishing Tools” tab and from there you can select “Scheduled Posts” to see your scheduled posts. In the scheduled posts tab, you have the ability to edit or delete your scheduled content.
How To Automate Facebook Posts using a Social Media Scheduling Tool (AKA MeetEdgar)
If you are looking for a social media scheduling tool to automate your posts on social media, then Edgar has you covered. Our simple to use platform makes it easy to automate Facebook posts and get more from your content.
Follow these steps to automate Facebook posts in Edgar.
- Click the Add New Content button
- Select your Facebook account from the accounts menu
- You have the option choose your category or you can leave your update as “General”.
Read more on how categories help organize your content - Type your update, add links, images or video. Select “Preview” if you would like to preview how your post will look on Facebook
- Click advanced settings to choose your scheduling option
- If you only want this content to be used once, you can select the “Use Once” option and Edgar will send out your content when it comes up in your schedule
- Or if you want your post to automatically publish once at a specific time, you can select “Use Once” option and then set a specific time and date below
If you want to see your automated Facebook post in Edgar, you can click over to your Queue where you can see all your scheduled social media content, including your Facebook posts. You can edit a post inside your Queue by selecting the edit icon on the right side of the scheduled post.
MeetEdgar offers a few other scheduling features that will allow your content to be recycled and last longer so you can be more consistent with less work. You can learn about these features here!
Before we send you out to start scheduling your social media content, we want to make a quick but important note about social media automation. You don’t want to automate everything about your social media strategy.
Social media requires you to be human, which means there should be an actual human behind the computer at some point in time.
Using social media scheduling tools like Edgar will make your content go farther and it will save you time and energy but it doesn’t mean you don’t need to do anything on social media.
Even if you automate Facebook posts or schedule social media content, you’ll still need a person to interact with your audience, engage with other community members and create meaningful dialogue on your social media pages.
The best way to use social media automation and scheduling tools is to use them to decrease the amount of time it takes you to create, manage and post your content. With that extra time, you can then turn around and invest it into creating real connections and having an authentic dialogue with your audience. In other words, be social!
With that being said, social media scheduling can save you hours of time and will keep your social media working for you while you work on other parts of your business, or maybe, just enjoy some well-deserved free time!