In 2023, users worldwide spent an average of 6 hours and 37 minutes per day on social media, up from roughly 18 minutes a day in 2013. This averages. So, if you’re not automating your social media posts, you might be wasting time that you can use on other marketing projects.
Automating your Facebook posting saves time by helping you work more efficiently, enabling small and large businesses to create, manage, and publish social media content regularly.
So, we’ll show you what a Facebook auto poster is, why you should be using one, and how to automate your Facebook posts.
Automate your Facebook posts with MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar does your Facebook scheduling for you so you can spend your time on higher-level content tasks.
What is a Facebook auto poster?
A Facebook auto poster is a social media management tool that publishes your Facebook posts at the manually scheduled time.
Some tools also post for you automatically, like MeetEdgar, which draws from a pre-curated library of posts and auto-posts them when you’ve run out of content. This way, your audience stays engaged with your content, and you remain at the top of their mind.
Why you should schedule Facebook posts
If you have a busy life, it can be hard to keep up with posting on Facebook daily. However, scheduling posts means you can still maintain a presence on the site even if you cannot be online all the time.
Let’s look at other reasons you should schedule Facebook posts in advance.
Maintain consistency throughout your social media channels
As a business owner, social media management can end up at the end of your list. But to constantly interact with your audience, you need consistent posts. Social media automation is your ticket to consistency without spending all your time on Facebook.
MeetEdgar is an excellent tool because you can write your post, schedule it, and forget about it, taking the stress out of posting.
For example, Andrea Wilson Woods, CEO of Cancer University, uses MeetEdgar and tried many services like Buffer and HootSuite, none had the bottomless content library like MeetEdgar.
She curates a month’s worth of news, uploads it into the Content Library, and schedules one daily post. This way, her audience continually engages with her content and never misses a significant update in the world of Cancer news.
A consistent online presence helps you build connections with your audience because they’ll always know they can count on your posts.
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. For example, 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 to reach your entire audience, even if the audience is awake while you are asleep!
Gives you more free time to engage with your audience
There is no social media without the word social. It’s a balance of sharing content and engaging with content. It’s hard for small business owners to find time to create excellent content and engage with followers. Automating Facebook posts and scheduling social media content frees up your time.
You can automate Facebook posts on your Facebook page, or you can use a social media scheduling tool like Edgar to do it for you. Using Edgar makes scheduling your posts easier 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 save 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. So, 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.
Additionally, you can schedule MeetEdgar content to expire on a particular date. For example, if you’re running a Black Friday promotion and don’t want to keep the content for a future sale.
You can create different variations of your post to test content to see what works best with your audience, keep your feeds fresh and increase engagement. Edgar will create auto variations of your content for you! For example, add in a link, and Edgar will pull up four quotes from the link’s content.
Did you come up with evergreen content but you’re not yet ready to use it? You can create the post and save it in order to publish it on a certain date. MeetEdgar holds the post until you schedule the post, when it will publish to your chosen social networks.
Then if you are short on time, you can also add the time slot directly from the schedule as an individual post or category. Pick a date or option to reoccur.
If you’ve sat staring at the screen trying to think up the absolute best post but end up just daydreaming about anything else, then you will 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. For example, 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, saving you lots of time from hopping from 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 can edit or delete your scheduled content.
The limitations of in-app Facebook automation
However, scheduling directly in the Facebook interface has its limitations. For instance, if you try to schedule a poll post to Facebook, we find it highly buggy. Once posted, users cannot interact with the poll post, so for the poll to engage with followers, we needed to repost it.
Although Facebook has Insights, it lacks a few features. It also won’t provide you with an overview of all your social media platforms in just one place, unlike a social media management tool.
Also, unlike social media management tools like MeetEdgar, Facebook can’t schedule posts to social media accounts on other platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn.
MeetEdgar can post to many social media platforms, including:
- Google My Business
So, if your company has other social media accounts other than Facebook, you should consider a social media management tool.
Automate your Facebook posts with MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar does your Facebook scheduling for you so you can spend your time on higher-level content tasks.
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 to 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 videos. 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 publish once at a specific time automatically, you can select the “Use Once” option and then set a particular 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. In addition, 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 to 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 essential note about social media automation. Of course, you don’t want to automate everything about your social media strategy.
You’ll still need a person to interact with your audience, engage with other community members and create a meaningful dialogue on your social media pages.
Use social media automation to decrease the time it takes you to create, manage and post your content. With that extra time, you can turn around and invest it into creating real connections and authentic dialogue with your audience. In other words, be social.
Watch our video on how to automate your Facebook posts with MeetEdgar:
How to find the best time to post to Facebook
Now that you know how to automate your Facebook posts, you need to determine the best time to post for your audience, or else you risk them not seeing or reading your posts.
Although we believe there is no set standard for the proper posting time, several studies sight that the best time to post on Facebook for overall engagement is in the early afternoon between 1-3pm.
Even though these suggested times might yield successful results for your content marketing strategy, it doesn’t mean it’s the optimal time to post for your industry. It also depends on factors like:
- Geography: where is your primary audience located?
- Time: When are the majority of them online?
- Industry: What industry are you in?
- Competition: When is your competition most active?
The answers to these questions determine an ideal posting schedule for you. But like anything you can measure, it will require continued tweak and refining.
3 tips to automatically post to Facebook
Once you determine your best time to post, you’ll want to ensure you get the most out of every post. To help you out, we made this list of Facebook posting best practices:
Tip 1: Tailor posts to match different audiences and time zones
When appropriately executed, segmented campaigns can contribute to over 760% revenue growth for your company, so it’s important to get this right.
It isn’t necessary to rewrite every post to cater to each audience segment. Instead, use a tool like MeetEdgar’s Content Variations to develop different versions for each audience segment.
With Content Variations, you can customize your message for each social media account before you schedule it. This way, each audience engages in the content variation that most resonates with them.
Tip 2: Don’t spam your audience
Although you might be excited to use a social media scheduler, you don’t want to sound like a spammy robot, throwing your message into the air like confetti. Your audience wants to hear from you, but not all the time.
Using features like MeetEdgar’s Advanced Analytics allows you to track when your audience most likely engages with your content. This way, you can post exactly when your audience wants to hear from you instead of constantly posting, hoping your posts will resonate.
Tip 3: Track and test your posts
Every time you post to your social media account, you’ll learn more and more about your audience and how they engage with your posts. As we discussed above, using this information provides valuable insights that can help you adjust your social media posting strategy.
Measuring your Facebook analytics gives you a complete picture of your Facebook marketing efforts like impressions, clicks, comments, reach, shares, and more. By constantly tweaking your content and posts, you can maximize your reach and engagement on your posts.
Conclusion
Social media scheduling can save you hours and 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!
