The appeal of Facebook stories lies in their limited time. They only last for 24 hours, which means people are more likely to view them as soon as they appear on their feeds so that they don’t miss them. To maximize this benefit, it’s important to learn how to schedule Facebook Stories and get the most out of them.
Scheduling your Stories allows you to target peak audience hours for maximum visibility and engagement. In this article, we’ll discuss the different ways to schedule Facebook Stories and cover important criteria for this type of content, so you can craft Stories more effectively. Let’s get started!
How to Schedule Facebook Stories via Meta Business Suite
You can schedule Facebook Stories on your page using the Meta Business Suite. Unfortunately, scheduling natively isn’t available on personal accounts, so you need to create a Facebook page for your business.
Here are the steps you should follow:
- If you don’t have a Facebook Page yet, the first thing you should do is make one. Open your Facebook account and go to Pages.
- Click Create a new page, add your business name and main category, and click Create Page.
- Once you have made a Facebook page, go to the Meta Business Suite and click Create story.
- Upload your chosen photo or video and edit it using the platform’s creative tools. You can trim or crop videos to meet Facebook’s requirements and add text or stickers to photos to make them more appealing.
You can upload up to 10 photos and videos at once, and each medium becomes a separate Story. This can be useful when uploading interconnected Stories or splitting one long video.
- After editing all your media, check the previews to see how your Stories will appear to your audience.
- When everything looks good, scroll down to Scheduling options and tap Schedule.
Scheduled stories can be created up to 29 days in advance, giving you time to plan your content more strategically. Meta Business Suite also has an Active times feature that shows your followers’ most active hours in the last 7 days.
After setting the date, click on Schedule, and you’re good to go.
How To Schedule Facebook Stories With Publer
While scheduling Facebook Stories natively can be convenient, there are other automatic scheduling tools, like Publer, that offer more features.
As a complete social media management platform, Publer goes beyond simple post scheduling. Our platform boasts a unified content calendar that can help you stay organized, a wide array of AI tools to simplify content creation, and a powerful analytics feature to improve your content strategy.
Let’s see how you can schedule Facebook Stories with Publer:
Create an Account on Publer
Creating an account on Publer is simple—all you need is a working email address or an existing social media account.
After that, you need to provide some details, such as your current position and industry, and explain how you plan to use Publer to improve your experience on the platform.
Once you have a workspace, you can connect your Facebook account with the platform by going to Social Accounts and clicking on Connect. Add your account, and after logging in, click Continue.
With Publer, you can schedule posts, Reels, and Stories on your personal profile, so there’s no need to create a separate Facebook page.
Prepare a Facebook Story
To draft your Facebook Story, go to Create and tap on the Facebook account you want to use. You can share the story on multiple accounts and on other platforms.
Tap on Story and upload the media you want for your post. Like Meta Business Suite, Publer supports bulk scheduling and allows you to create up to 500 posts at once.
Hover over your photo or video to access the editing tool. You can crop, resize, or add a filter and stickers to photos and crop or trim the footage for videos.
Optimize Your Facebook Story
Publer has fantastic tools with which you can optimize your Facebook Stories. Since they don’t have an option for captions and hashtags, the way to make them noticeable is by creating a visually appealing post.
Instead of uploading a simple photo or video, use one of our design tools to improve your content. With Publer, you will have access to paid VistaCreate features even if you don’t have an account or subscription, and you also have the option to use a personal account if you have one.
After editing, click Save, and it will automatically upload the edited image to Publer for posting.
Set the Schedule for Your Story
When your Story is ready, you can schedule it for posting. Publer offers four scheduling options for Facebook Stories.
- Manual scheduling, which allows you to select the time and date for your Story.
- Auto scheduling, which uses predefined timeslots on the platform to schedule your Story.
- Recycle scheduling, which allows you to repost Stories indefinitely.
- Recurring scheduling, which reshares Stories for a limited time.
Before scheduling your post, click on Get a reminder to get a notification when your Story is ready to be posted.
On your scheduled date, you’ll get a notification from Publer. When you click on it, you’ll be redirected to the Publer app, where you can preview your post and open it on Facebook to make any last-minute optimizations. We recommend adding some trending audio or stickers to boost your Story’s visibility and engagement.
Requirements & Criteria for Facebook Stories
To ensure that your Stories are optimized for the viewer, there are some image and video requirements you should follow. These include the following rules:
Videos
- Your Story should be between 1 and 15 seconds long. If you have longer footage, you can split it into multiple stories.
- Since Stories are meant to be viewed on mobile phones, they should be shot vertically or have an aspect ratio of 9:16. Different aspect ratios can result in empty spaces in your Story.
- Your Story should have a resolution of 1080×1920 for optimum quality. The minimum resolution is 540×960, but it can result in a blurred or low-quality Story.
Images
- Images should also have an aspect ratio of 9:16. That said, if you are uploading landscape photos, the empty spaces can be used for on-screen text, stickers, and other visual elements.
- Image file types should be JPG or PNG.
- Your image must have a maximum size of 30MB.
5 Key Benefits of Scheduling Facebook Stories with Publer
If Stories are meant to be a more authentic and “in-the-moment” content format, why should you schedule them beforehand? The answer is simple: scheduling Facebook Stories offers several benefits and advantages for your content creation process. It can help you:
#1. Save Time
Learning how to schedule Facebook Stories will help you save time and streamline your content posting schedule. Rather than conceptualizing, creating, and uploading each Story manually, you can use Publer scheduling to draft multiple Stories to be published throughout the day so you can focus on other important tasks.
#2. Reduce Mistakes
Creating Stories on the fly can result in errors, typos, and other minute mistakes in your post. While this is acceptable for personal Stories, it can be detrimental to brands and businesses.
Scheduling Facebook Stories allows you to craft and plan each post carefully, ensuring that all links are working properly and that you only publish high-quality and engaging Stories.
#3. Monitor Analytics
Stories can give you great insight into your audience’s activity on the platform. By scheduling your Facebook Stories, you can easily monitor and review their performance to get an idea of your peak hours and start posting content to target these hours.
#4. Improve Overall Engagement
If you have a product launch coming up or important updates you want to announce, scheduling Facebook Stories to promote them will build interest among your audience. If you create Stories with hints and teasers about the big announcement, you encourage conversation about the topic and ensure high engagement rates.
#5. Reach Target Audience
Marketing to a global audience can be difficult due to different time zones. One way to address this issue is by scheduling Facebook Stories to go live when your followers are most active. This ensures that your post reaches its target audience without having to manually adjust for the time difference.
Key Takeaways
- You can schedule Facebook Stories for your Facebook Page on the Meta Business Suite.
- You can also schedule Facebook Stories through a social media management tool like Publer to access more scheduling options.
- Facebook Stories follow certain criteria when it comes to aspect ratio, resolution, file size, and length.
- Scheduling Facebook Stories can help you save time and reduce mistakes in content creation. It can also improve engagement and help you reach your target audience more easily.
Ervin Kalemi
