Ever since Facebook began drastically reducing the organic reach of posts on Business Pages, it’s become harder for content marketers and brands to achieve strong engagement with fans. You have to be very strategic and thoughtful about the content you share, to ensure it is truly valuable and interesting to your audience – because unless you can gain those coveted likes and shares, your posts may only be seen by a dismal 1-2% of your Page’s followers.
The problem, of course, is that it can be very time-consuming to constantly find (or create) great content, not to mention consistently coming up with fresh ideas for what to share. Enter Post Planner. This popular tool is used by some of the most influential social media marketing pros, and for good reason – it can be a huge time-saver when it comes to finding great content and scheduling Facebook posts.
Post Planner finds great content so you don’t have to
Post Planner is a Facebook app that connects directly to your account. The “Post Planner Pro” version is free and allows you to connect and post to up to three Facebook Pages (or your personal profile plus two Pages). There are also three premium level accounts ranging from $29 to $99 per month.
Once you set up the app and give it permission to access your Facebook account, you’ll have the chance to select up to three accounts (aka Pages) to connect. Next, Post Planner will guide you through an interactive tutorial showing how to use its various features.
Viral Photos
This ingenious feature gives you access to a library of the current most viral images floating around Facebook land. Find one you like, and you can either share it from the Page that posted it, or publish it as a new post on your Timeline (a shortlink will be added to give credit to the Page that originally posted it).
Once you choose a viral photo to share, you can choose to publish the post immediately, schedule it for a future time/day, or add it to your Queue.
Queue Schedule
If you’ve ever used Buffer for scheduling your social posts, this feature works exactly the same way. You enter the times of day that you want to share new content, add content to your Queue and Post Planner will automatically publish the content at the selected times (as long as there is something new in the Queue).
But here’s the really cool part – you can further customize this so that only certain types of posts can get shared at certain times of day. For instance, you could have your Queue Schedule set for 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., but indicate that you only want photos to be posted in the 11 a.m. time slot and only link posts at 4 p.m. This allows you to ensure some variety in your post types each day.
The three post types are status updates, photos, and links – you can choose to allow any or all of these post types for each time slot in your Queue. To remove one of these from a time slot, just click on the icon and it will go dim. Click on it again to add it back.
Trending Content (Paid feature)
Enter a keyword related to your industry or any topic that would be of interest to your followers, and Post Planner will show you the most popular trending articles on that topic. You can sort this content by “most recent” or “most popular” in order to search for articles to share on your own Page.
Note: This feature is only available with Post Planners’ paid accounts. You can still use this feature to view trending articles, but you won’t be able to share or Queue them directly from within the app with the free account.
Add More Content Feeds
To find more sources of great content, you can click the “Search for more feeds” link under the Trending Content section of the dashboard. It will show the most popular feeds (by topic) and how many Post Planner users are following each feed. You can also follow other users’ folders (collections of feeds).
The Bottom Line
Post Planner is great as a post scheduling tool, but its real value is in helping you to quickly find popular content to share. Since it only works with Facebook, Post Planner won’t take the place of a full social media management platform like Hootsuite or Sprout Social. But, it’s still a really useful tool to have in your social media marketing toolkit.
Do you use Post Planner? We’d also be interested to hear if anyone has one of the paid plans, and how you would evaluate the extra features that come with those? Leave us a comment below or visit our Facebook page!
