Will the new schedule post feature of Facebook’s Creator Studio benefit brands?

Facebook’s Creator Studio recently launched a new feature where a user who has a business account profile can schedule posts, stories and IGTV videos on Facebook and Instagram. For the first time ever posts and stories can be scheduled up to 6 months in advance. Social Media marketers will benefit from this since Instagram scheduling has been a hassle in the past. Social media managers availed third-party apps which had many restrictions due to Instagram's API. 

We spoke to brands to decode whether this new feature will be a boon for them. In terms of building a better consumer interaction with their audience.

Mangesh Panditrao, CEO, Shoptimize India Pvt. Ltd agreed that it will help brands leverage by putting out a consistent stream of content. He shared, “The dashboard will now give deeper insights into user data for both Facebook and Instagram. Analyzing the page insights and content performance, content can be scheduled as per user behavior to garner more engagement and reach.”

Prashant Deorah, Managing Director, Puretech Digital shared that the creative studio schedule feature will have no effect on Facebook pages since post scheduling was an in-built feature on the social media tool. “In the case of Instagram, this may be a boon for both companies and agencies. Instagram trends show that certain posts do better than others during certain hours of the day. Like all social media tools, this algorithm constantly changes, so scheduling and rescheduling a post can be of utmost help for the brand. Not only does it help the brand in terms of regular posts that are part of a content calendar, but it also gives the brand to work with new creatives if a topic suddenly starts trending”, remarked Deorah.

This new feature means less switching between different tools says James Gilbert, APAC Marketing Director, HubSpot. However, Gilbert stated, “I’m not sure the new features will drastically help brands put out any more constant stream of content than they already can, as there are many other social media scheduling tools already helping them achieve that. For brands, the main benefit of the new features is probably the ability to schedule Instagram grid posts and IGTV natively, alongside Facebook content, and have Page Insights available all in one place.”

Mani Gopalaratnam, Chief Technology Officer, Customer Success, Resulticks, says that in addition to this new feature it does not offer any new functionality other than to make the information across the two platforms available in a single portal.

However, Gopalaratnam states, “The brands can now create and stream a constant flow of content that can be segmented for different audience groups. We know that contextual streams—ones that reflect the unique interests, past behavior, and other attributes of specific target groups—tend to have better traction, and adding audience time propensities to the mix may improve the results even more.”

“Consumers want contextual content. Brands can no longer rely on sending communications and sharing content at their own convenience and schedule. They need to send the right content to the right audience at the most appropriate time, and only then can they reach today’s consumers and boost their engagement. To execute prime-time scheduling, brands need finely defined audience segments and persona groups along with time propensities and the next best content algorithms," he added.

Saisangeeta Israni, GM Marketing, Spykar Lifestyle commented saying, “This new feature will act as a dashboard in managing Facebook and Instagram under one platform. This feature would also help to filter and priorities the Direct messages. As in there are two categories of the DM's Top Request and All Requests. The Top Requests are from the people having huge following benefiting the brand to accept their requests.”

Prime-Time scheduling has a powerful new algorithm that analyzes all of your followers' interactions to calculate your Prime times. “You can schedule posts for later and see how well your past posts did. Prime helps to view the success of past posts, schedule your future posts throughout the week and calculate the best time to post. The brands will be able to leverage the feature to get maximum exposure. The service would be more insightful”, remarked Israni.

Companies set their content calendar in advance and showcasing new launches in terms of product, cities and the way services are provided is extremely crucial. Rahul Deorah, VP Marketing, UrbanClap shared, “Consistent posts help build a sense of trust in a company, using influencers and celebrities to help further a brand's outlook in the market.”

With the help of research, brands have chosen certain times that they feel work for them, however, now having an engine that shares statistics true to their company will indeed help brands. “Reaching out to a larger audience with each post helps not only with brand awareness but with acquisition too. Now in the same spend as earlier, we are reaching out to a larger consumer base. Primetime scheduling is crucial for all companies and we are sure to see positive results on this”, remarked Deorah.

Saurabh Rathore, Founder & CEO, Gobble Me Good says, “As prime time algorithm analyses all your follower's behavior. This feature will help you with a certain time frame you can publish your post to get optimum engagement. This will really help brands with a small or no ad budget to capitalize on organic reach.”

Speaking about this new feature Mairu Gupta, Sr. Director, Global Media Distribution, NBA India shared, “Though the setup is still basic, the ability to schedule content on Instagram is helpful for brands and publishers with a steady stream of content. One would traditionally rely on a 24/7 staffing model to achieve this; so, this essentially frees up execution time that could be better utilized in planning and optimizing their channel.”

Angad Bhatia, Founder MensXp & COO Indiatimes Lifestyle Network commenting on the feature said, “Evolution of the creator tool is a step in the right direction for giving more control to brands/publishers. At Indiatimes Lifestyle Network we opted into the Facebook ecosystem very early on and as one of the largest publishers on the platform in the world we are happy to see the evolution of the tool to build more consistency and sustainability for creators.”

Bhatia concluded saying, “The deep analytics provided by the tool will enable better-optimized programming decisions which should ensure the most relevant content being served at the most appropriate time thereby increasing engagement rate.”