How to Use Facebook Post Scheduling Tool at your Doggie Daycare

If you're the owner of a pet care business, I'm sure you're well aware of the stress of trying to manage your Facebook page. It can be a real nightmare trying to keep everything organized. Beyond posting pet pictures of your business and trying to keep your message responsiveness time up, you also have to figure out your content calendar posting times.

Most large companies have an entire team of people that manage their social media. Being a small business owner, you're not so lucky. It's up to you to get the job done. Well, have no fear, Facebook's post scheduling tool is just what you need. Now, you can sit down for an hour, schedule a month's worth of Facebook posts, and then let Facebook take care of posting them when you tell them. Here's how to get started.

1. Write "Interaction-Friendly" Facebook Post for Future Publishing

Sit down with your marketing team (or yourself if you're a solopreneur) and come up with some good marketing posts for the coming month. This is what marketing agencies call your "content calendar" and they'll charge you an arm and a leg to create one for you.

Having a content calendar set up for the next few months will give you some breathing room. You're not going to have to worry about when you're posting or what you're posting. You'll have your entire Fall or Spring laid out ahead of time.

Even if you don't have a marketing team, invite a couple friends to Starbucks and buy them a coffee on Saturday morning. Ask them to help you brainstorm marketing content, in exchange for a tasty coffee concoction. You could also ask your current clients what types of promotional offers they would be most interested in. Try to come up with content that requires your followers to interact with your page. The more people interact with your content, the more often it shows up in the newsfeeds of others.

2. Schedule Facebook Post's Future Publishing Date

Once you have your content ideas ready for publishing, start planning your publishing cycle. There are many ideas out there about how many posts you should be publishing for your Facebook page. Find a quantity of posts that works for you and start scheduling posts.

For us here at DoggieDashboard, we do a weekly post. This keeps us fresh with the algorithms, but doesn't cost us too much time or energy in creating these posts.

I'm personally someone that believes that a business should post no more than one time per day. Ideally, I think two to three posts per week is the perfect number. You don't want to overwhelm your Facebook followers with posts about your business, but at the same time, you don't want people to forget about your business either.

You'll also want to think about what time you want to publish your posts. There are certain times during the day when people interact more with Facebook posts and you'll want to be posting at those times. Posting and sharing in the early morning hours or in the evening tend to work best, because that is when the majority of users are on Facebook. If you're posting your content during the middle of the day, you're not going to see much interaction with it until the end of the day. By that time, other businesses will have posted their content and yours will slowly slide down the page before your users have a chance to see it.

3. Verify that Post is Scheduled for Future Publishing

Last but not least, once you schedule your post, make sure that you verify that it's properly scheduled. There's currently no limit on the amount of posts that you can schedule for your business, so you can easily lay out an entire month or two of Facebook posts.

As a good rule of thumb, it's best to have at least two months worth of content in the pipeline. This way, you're not wasting your time looking for new content to post when you should be running your business. At DoggieDashboard, we have several months of useful blog posts in the pipeline. That way, every Monday, our system will post a new post and the algorithms will see it and add it to their listings. By having several months of posts ready to publish, we can focus on coding new features and not on writing new content.

Just imagine the time you'll save not having to think about making promotional Facebook posts. If you're not a regular poster on Facebook, your posts will start to be shown to a smaller percentage of people due to Facebook's algorithm. Therefore, it's good to post on the regular and try to encourage your users to interact with your posts. If you're already at your wit's end trying to keep up with managing your Facebook page, there's no way you're taking the time to make timely weekly marketing posts every week. With the scheduling tool, you don't have to worry anymore. In the words of the famous infomercial for the Showtime Rotisserie, just "Set it and forget it!"

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