Best practices for scheduling content
This guide outlines best practices when it comes to scheduling content through Buffer. Our top tips include configuring unique posting times for each social channel and limiting duplicated content.
Keeping your Facebook accounts safe and avoiding being flagged for spam or bot behavior
When sharing the same content to multiple Facebook Pages, posts that are published at the same time can be flagged by Facebook as spam or bot behavior. This can result in the posts failing to send and your access token being revoked, causing you to need to refresh the account in Buffer. In some cases, Facebook may even suspend your account.
There are some steps you can take in order to keep your accounts safe. When setting up your posting schedules, it's a good idea to make sure they're different from one another, even if the times are just a few minutes apart. For example, let's say you have five Facebook Pages and you'd like to publish a post to them every morning at around 9:30am. Rather than having a 9:30am slot in each posting schedule, we'd recommend something like:
- Page 1: 9:30am
- Page 2: 9:34am
- Page 3: 9:39am
- Page 4: 9:42am
- Page 5: 9:47am
When scheduling posts, we'd recommend using the Add to Queue option, which will save your post in the next available time slot from your posting schedule. This ensures that posts are sent out at the staggered times you've configured. If you use the Share Now or Schedule Post option when scheduling a post for multiple pages, all of the posts will be sent at exactly the same time, which increases the chances of Facebook perceiving this as spam or bot behavior, which could result in them flagging your account.
Variations to the post can also help to greatly reduce the likelihood of Facebook flagging the accounts for spam. If you're planning to share a post to 100 Facebook Pages for example, instead of crafting one post and sending it to all 100 Pages, it's better to create four or five variations of the post.
Buffer should not be used for sharing duplicate content to employees’ LinkedIn profiles
While it is technically possible to connect a large number of LinkedIn profiles to Buffer, this is not recommended and can result in issues like account suspension (on LinkedIn’s side).
Social networks in general, but particularly LinkedIn and Facebook, have started to actively discourage personal profiles from being used for business and advertising purposes. They intend for personal profiles to be approached and treated as independent, personal accounts, where the content shared is authentic and created/shared by the owner of the profile.
If the LinkedIn team notices that duplicate content is being shared to profiles, they will often suspend those accounts. Suspensions are usually temporary, but will happen over and over again if the behavior continues.