I maintain a Facebook fan page for Mid-Columbia Insurance. When searching for material to update the page, I usually will come across 2 or 3 items that could be posted. Problem is, if I post all 3 at once then people will skip over the 2nd or 3rd one, thinking I am spamming them. If I don’t post all 3 at once then I will never remember to come back and write up the other 2 posts.

A perfect solution is to be able to schedule the posts so that the 2nd and 3rd post will show up hours, if not days, later. The only problem with this solution is that Facebook does not provide any way to do this. I, therefore, set out to find a 3rd party solution that would allow me to schedule posts into the future.

Here are the solutions I have found. I will update this list as I find other solutions with a note in the ‘Update’ section on what I changed.

The Contenders for Scheduling Facebook Fan Page Updates

HootSuite with Ping.fm

HootSuite is the program the perfect solution for scheduling twitter posts. It can post to multiple accounts and can even support multiple users. The reason I mention it here is because you can configure it to send the tweets to Ping.fm which, in turn, posts them to Facebook.

This is great if you don’t mind limiting yourself to 140 characters, but I would rather be a little more verbose in Facebook. The other drawback is that you cannot carry on a conversation using HootSuite in Twitter since only my half of the conversation would go up to Facebook and I don’t want each of my replies to go up as a separate conversation post in Facebook.

Pro:

• Scheduling works perfect, posts can be edited and rescheduled easily, url shortening built in.

Con:

• Since it is set up for twitter you are limited to 140 characters.
• Every tweet made using HootSuite is posted to Facebook.
• Thumbnail in links is a random picture from the site since it cannot be specified.

SocialTomorrow

When I went looking for something that could schedule more than 140 characters, SocialTomorrow was what I found. Looked promising till I set up my first few posts and found they did not show up on the fan page. It was not till later in the day that I found the posts had been posted to my regular facebook status. argh!

I looked for a way to check to make sure I had set the accounts up correctly but there appears to be no way to edit your settings once you enter them. Well, so much for that.

Pro:

• More than 140 characters.

Con:

• Not sure if it can post to fan pages.
• Not able to find way to edit Facebook settings.

Sendible

With a little more searching I found Sendible. The site seemed quite a more robust than SocialTomorrow and my posts showed up on the Facebook fan page when sent.

I thought I had found what I was looking for until I noticed that the posts were missing something. The posts were all formatted as status updates, even those with links. HootSuite/Ping.fm had spoiled me. The updates look so much better when they have the little thumbnail picture from the link and the first line or two from the linked web page.

I will post a note in their support forum to see if there is a way to get Sendible to work. I would be more than willing to pay the $3 month for the pro version too (especially to remove the ‘powered by Sendible’ tagged onto each post.

Update I went through the Sendible support forums and found this:

To generate a Facebook link-preview from Sendible, you need to include an attached image in your post. If Sendible finds an attached image and a url in the text of your message, it will then generate the link preview for you.

What it does is put the link’s title below your post and displays the thumbnail you attached.
What it doesn’t do is put any of the text from the link below the title. What is strange is that it has to be a photo located on your hard drive. You cannot give it a URL. So you have to download the photo from the web site then attach it to your post.

Pro:

• Great interface, scheduling, almost what I was looking for.

Con:

• Monthly fee for ‘pro’ version.
• Free version is ‘tagged’ with “powered by sendible” after your post.
• Posts with links only post the link title and do not display any text from the link.

PingLater.fm

I am not counting it as a solution since the site is down and from the blog it appears that it has been down longer than it was up.

LetterMeLater with Ping.fm

Just found this site and it looks promising. Create an email and have it sent whenever you want. You select the date and time. You can schedule emails from their website or you can email the text of your post and the time you want it sent and LetterMeLater will add it to your schedule on the site.

So LetterMeLater can email the update to Ping.fm. Might be all the advantages of HootSuite without the 140 character limitation.

The free account only gives 30 scheduled messages per month. Since I plan on sending about 3-5 messages per day I need to be able to schedule at least 100-150 per month. So if this site works I will have pay $19.95 to upgrade which give 400 messages per month.

More details as I hopefully get to try it later today.

Conclusion

Still looking…. I am contemplating writing a little routine that would just grab a line of text from a text file and send it to Facebook using Ping.fm on a scheduled basis.

Update

• 11/21/2009 Sendible: found a way to get link thumbnails to display but the link’s article only has a headline no link text.
• 11/21/2009 LetterMeLater: Just found this site and will have to check it out.