Kim Walsh-Phillips: How To Schedule Using Your Facebook Timeline for Better Ad Results

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Paying for people to see your posts is simply just a part of doing business on Facebook. This is because Facebook makes no apologies for the fact that only 8% to 10% of those in your network will ever see your posts if you do not promote them. So how do you automate the promotion of Facebook posts? If you are using a social media content scheduler like Hootsuite or LikeThisLibrary, you can’t. The only way to automate your post promotion is to set a sponsored story campaign and automatically promote any post you have running at www.facebook.com/adsmanager.

Step One: Choose “Page post engagement”

Step Two: Choose “Keep my ad up-to-date”

We use this on some of our private client accounts to keep a steady stream of engagement and new qualified prospects coming to the page. Budgets are generally 1 to 5 dollars per day. But perhaps you don’t want to pay for every post to be promoted. Maybe you want to focus your budget on those who will capture leads and drive sales and allow the content-rich posts to live on their own. (Which is what I would recommend). If so, then the only way to schedule the post promotion ahead of time is to schedule it directly on your Facebook timeline. Facebook made this function a lot easier recently. It used to be rather clunky to use.
To schedule a post using Facebook’s Timeline Scheduler, follow these steps:

1. Write your post update
2. Click on the clock icon
3. Pick your desired day and time
4. And click “schedule”

You can even schedule from your mobile device. You can do this while at an event or taking a photo of something. Instead of needing to remember to do it later, immediately upload it to your Facebook page and schedule when it will run. After your posts are scheduled, go back into your Ads Manager and pick and choose any of your posts to run paid traffic to, even the ones scheduled for the future. One note of caution here, if you don’t set the schedule of the ad to correspond with the time and day the post will be going live, then your ad will start running before your post does. This might not be a problem for you, but if there is a reason why you don’t want something out earlier than the post, then schedule the ads as well.

I have used post and ad scheduling to automate every campaign schedule for our firm. This is how I continue to get a high return on the time and money spent on our social media efforts, without having to spend time on it each day. Utilize this tactic to improve your Facebook results and increase your social media marketing productivity.