One of my pet peeves (And yes, I have a few!) has always been that it was a pain to share Facebook updates from my newsfeed at a scheduled time. Buffer has allowed you to schedule sharing these updates for some time, however it was based on pre-selected time slots. I often worried that I may be spamming my followers and it was a nuisance to take the time to check what I had scheduled already to be shared… especially since I use multiple applications to schedule social media updates.
I would on occasion use my Hootlet app from Hootsuite to schedule these updates, but unlike Buffer, it doesn’t pull all the content from the update … yet again adding more steps to the process.
It was shame because many of my friends I consider to be business associates and they often share some juicy content. But in the interest of NOT spamming my followers, especially on my Facebook Business page, I often chose not to share these updates. Or I would try to make a mental note to come back and share it later, but you can probably guess how that went.
Anyway …
Very recently the geniuses from Buffer in conjunction with Facebook added a new custom scheduling feature. Now you can share updates from your social networks including from your personal Facebook profile to your Facebook pages as well as . Woohoo! This so excites me!
Here’s a quick snapshot of what it looks like:
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. I recommend reading the full article on Introducing Custom Scheduling by Buffer. There’s some other great bells and whistles to this new feature you’ll want to check out including:
- Custom scheduling images and retweets
- Display of Custom Scheduled posts in your queue
- Scheduling your Tweets, Facebook posts and LinkedIn updates on Buffer for Android & iPhone
Here’s one thing I do want to point out that you CAN’T do and what I recommend you do to address it. Unfortunately although you can tag people using the @ reply (ex. @Michele_Welch) on Twitter notifying them that you’ve shared their content, you can’t tag someone of Facebook when you set up the custom scheduling … unless I’ve missed something.
The quick fix is simply this. Once the update has been posted on Facebook, simply go back to the update, click on ‘Edit’ and add the person/business you want to tag in the description area. It’s an extra step for sure, but it allows you to show others that you are sharing the love … And that’s a good thing. 
Although I have not tested it out with LinkedIn as of yet, I gather the process would be the same as Facebook.
But cool new feature right? Have you tested this new feature yet? What do you think?