Ahoy there, me hearties! It’s day 35 of 100 New Media Tools, to promote New Media Europe, and I’m Mike Russell, one of the co-founders of the New Media Europe conference. Today is the day of the F8 conference in California, it’s the day that Facebook and its developers tell the rest of the world what is coming up in the world of Facebook.
Facebook Instant Articles
Of course we all know Facebook Instant Articles is on the cards for everyone, that means nice, responsive, good looking, native Facebook articles for bloggers and podcasters. I for one look forward to getting my hands on Facebook Instant Articles once they’re released.
F8 Conference
You may have guessed, as it’s all about Facebook recently, I’m going to be focusing on Facebook for my New Media Tool today, and I’m going to use the page scheduling tool. Chachie and Andrea, our social media managers for New Media Europe and UK Podcasters, already do a fantastic job of using the Facebook scheduler.
Now we’re going to take it up a notch. Time is ticking away for the UK Podcasters online conference, it’s happening in just 9 days. Want to register to watch for free wherever you are in the world? Then get ready to screenshot the next snap for the URL.
Facebook Business Manager
My team and I use Facebook Business Manager to manage multiple business pages that we have on Facebook. Let’s find the right one, aha, UK Podcasters, there we go. You can do this too, if you want to publish a ton of stuff on Facebook, use the publishing tools in Business Manager, not a 3rd party app. Facebook doesn’t really like 3rd party apps. Please only use the native publishing tools.
Pre-Scheduling Posts on Facebook
You can do that by clicking Publishing tools once you’re in Business Manager, and then you will get a lovely place to create new posts. Scheduled posts, at the moment we’ve got nothing scheduled ready to go, so I’m going to create a post to promote our speakers at the UK Podcasters online conference.
We’ve got 9 days until the online conference, 36 speakers, 36 divided by 9 equals 4. We’re going to go rather intense, as we are promoting a conference and we want to get lots of sign-ups for it. We’re going to post 4 posts a day about our speakers. Usually I would not recommend posting that many posts a day on a Facebook page, but we’re going to try it out, and I’ll let you know the results.
Scheduling 4 Posts a Day
We’ll schedule 9am, 12pm, 3pm and 6pm British Summer Time. Let’s grab the link from one of our first speakers and head into the Publishing tools to add the link there, and create our first post. As you can see, that link doesn’t look too good right now, so I’m going to add a picture, which is easy to do. Then we just find the already designed picture, that will make a nice clickable image link.
Perfect, looking great. Now we just need to add some text. That’s great, all done now. The best thing is you can actually tag people in pre-scheduled posts, so Ani will get a notification when this post goes live. Then we schedule.
Finishing Up
This one is going to go out at 9 o’clock exactly in British time, and of course we don’t want to enable this, otherwise nobody will see it. Click Schedule and there we go. It’s going to hit the queue any second now. There it is in the native Facebook Publishing Tools Scheduler ready to go out, 9 o’clock, in about 30 minutes from now.
My team and I will be stuck inside Facebook Publishing Tools in the Business Manager today, creating posts about the speakers for the UK Podcasters online conference, and also New Media Europe. Remember, if you haven’t connected your Facebook page to Facebook for Business, I highly recommend you do that. Head to business.facebook.com now. If you do that today, you get a gold star.