How to Schedule a Post on Facebook

Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve got a great idea for a Facebook status update, but it would be better to post it TOMORROW instead of RIGHT NOW? Never fear, Facebook offers a simple (yet, somewhat unknown) tool that allows you to schedule posts in advance – or even back date them. Today, I’ll show you how.

To enable this tool, you must first enter your founding/start/opening date into your Facebook business page. Before you schedule a post for the first time, Facebook will ask you to plug in this information. Hover over the little clock-looking icon below your status update field and click:

If you don’t already have the start date of your business plugged in, Facebook will ask you to do that. Follow those simple steps and come back to your business page and click that icon again. The first field to select is the year:

The year option lets you go back as far as the beginning of your restaurant’s launch date, so you can back date posts, too. Have old photos of your Grand Opening? Pictures of staff at different times throughout the history of the business? These are great things to post using the back dating feature.

Once you’ve selected the year, it gives you month, then day, then time…down to the minute; so you can schedule an post to be pushed out on March 15, 2013, at 10:50 am, if you want. Once you’re done selecting all the details, just click “Schedule.”

That’s it! Pretty simple, huh? This tool can save tons of time – just block out an hour on Monday and you can schedule posts to hit once each day all week.

Good luck!

Matt White is CEO of My Restaurant Posts (http://www.myrestaurantposts.com), which helps owners/managers feel better about restaurant social media by providing social media posts for restaurants for as little as $1 a day.

Tags: facebook, media, restaurant, social

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Non-Operator Comment by Matt White on March 13, 2013 at 11:17am: @Brian - good points.

Non-Operator Comment by Brian Gatti on March 13, 2013 at 11:13am: I'll have to check out Sprout Social. Honestly, the only reason I frequently recommend HootSuite is that for most restaurants (and small business owners in general), they only need the free offering HootSuite provides. A quick glance at Sprout looks a little more robust that HootSuite, probably more useful for someone who does a lot of SMM.

Non-Operator Comment by Matt White on March 13, 2013 at 10:57am: @Brian HootSuite is good. Sprout Social is another one. And I recently started using Buffer App.

Non-Operator Comment by Brian Gatti on March 13, 2013 at 9:18am: This is a good tip about Facebook. I've been using HootSuite for social media scheduling because its a single dashboard but this is great for people only using Facebook as their channel.

Non-Operator Comment by Matt White on March 12, 2013 at 12:36pm: Thanks, Ola. We don't have any current posts on Pinterest, but certainly not one to be avoided! Your article provided some good information, for sure.

Comment by Ola Ayeni on March 12, 2013 at 12:23pm: This is a great tip! So simple yet so important. Do you have any helpful tips for restaurant owners about Pinterest? Here is an article we wrote on the importance of Pinterest in case you are interested. http://buff.ly/Wmy5Gm