Cheap, reliable and sure NOT to hurt your EdgeRank.
In an earlier post I suggested that HootSuite might be bad for your Facebook Edgerank. It’s fine for scheduling posts for Twitter, but it caused my Facebook interactions to plummet! So how do you schedule posts, especially if you use HootSuite to Collaborate?
If you follow us on Facebook you may have noticed that updates regarding articles have been coming a little later than usual lately. That’s because I’m writing them and posting them first thing in the morning (for me) 11:00 am. Yup I’m a night owl. Updates would be much more timely if I lived in the Canary Islands. This week I’m waking up at dawn to learn to paraglide with the folks at cloud9, so updates should be coming a little earlier!
I still schedule my posts though, and I give access to everyone on my team to my scheduling tool. I use a simple Google Doc and share it with anyone that needs access. It’s a spreadsheet with the days of the week and posts. This way I can just copy and paste any update I might want, but still get my creative output done in one fell swoop.
Is it ideal? No. But we know that Facebook’s EdgeRank devalues content posted by an outside application. So, until they include scheduling within Facebook, waking up with the birds is your best option for scheduling Facebook Posts. Personally I hate it. Before I realized what a drastic hit my interaction rates were taking by scheduling updates via HootSuite I would wake up, read the paper and write (on a legal pad, my favorite). My laptop stayed closed until at least 1:00 pm. Those were great days. Now I open my laptop and before I know it I’ve wasted an hour of my life.
If you have the means (buy my book) I have a great idea to get around the problem of the status update time suck. Virtual Assistants. Sites like brickworkindia.com allow you to hire a virtual assistant in places like India to do all kinds of tasks. They charge by the hour or project. Try bidding for 500 status updates, you provide the content, they just log in post your update at the correct time. This way you still have high EdgeRank you don’t have to open your computer unless you want to.
