I’m here to make your life easier. Well, probably not that much easier. But I have a couple tricks that could help shave a good 3-5 minutes off your workday. (It’s the small wins in life, right?)
1. Comment on your post before it’s published
When we credit photographers on Facebook, we typically post the credit as a first comment on our post. This can be tricky when you schedule a post hours into the future and know you might not be able to post the first comment credit (or forget to).
Here’s a trick to get around that.
- Schedule your post
- Go to “Scheduled Posts” in Publishing Tools
- Click on the post you want to comment on
- Click on the post again, and Facebook will take you to the preview
- Comment on the post
2. Searching for a post on your page
The new Facebook search tool has saved me so much time in life. They must never get rid of it. Ever.
Have you ever needed to find a post you published a year ago? Two years ago? THREE YEARS AGO? Nobody has time to scroll through years of Facebook posts. Now, there’s a tool for that.
- Go to your brand’s Facebook page
- Click on “Posts” under “Home” on the navigation menu to the left of the screen
- Do you see the search bar on the righthand side under the cover photo?
- Make this your best friend
3. Adding emojis
We’re no strangers to emojis here at CSU. But we post to Facebook on our laptops 99% of the time. Sure, we could post to Facebook on our computers and then edit the post on our phones to add the emojis. But why do that when there’s a hack?
For Mac users:
- Click Control + Command + Spacebar
- Yes, we cried, too
For PC users:
- There are plenty of Chrome plugins out there that allow you to install emojis onto your browser. Like this one and this one
Happy emoji using 👍
4. Posting GIFs
This is probably old news by now. But, I’m sharing just in case.
If you’ve ever tried to upload a GIF file to Facebook, you likely noticed it doesn’t work. Facebook only allows pages to post GIFs through Giphy.
http://gph.is/YBEcrL
Ughh. I know. Luckily, Giphy is really great.
However, you might notice it’s still a little tricky to get the GIF on Facebook. There’s only one specific way to do it. Here’s how:
- Find your GIF on Giphy
- Click the “Advanced” tab next to the “Share” tab under the GIF
- Copy the “Giphy Link” and post that sucker into Facebook
- Voila
5. Adding captions to your videos
Okay this tool won’t actually help you save any time. If anything, it might make your day even longer. (Boo me, I know.)
But, it’s really important to include captions on the videos you post for multiple reasons. First and most importantly, adding captions allows anyone with impaired hearing to enjoy your video. Second, a lot of users don’t actually watch videos with the sound turned on in public places. When I’m scrolling through Facebook while sitting on the bus or in the dentist’s office, I can’t turn the volume on. So, I always appreciate when brands include captions.
Here’s the thing, though. When you initially upload a video and click on the “Captions” tab, Facebook prompts you to upload a SRT File.
Umm…what? Exactly.
If you’re like me, I just want a technologically easier way to add captions to my videos. Luckily, there’s an easier way. Here’s how to do it:
- Publish your video (unfortunately, you have to publish the video before the easy caption option appears)
- Click “Edit Post”
- Click on the “Captions” tab
- Click the “Generate” button with the magical wand (because this really is magic)
- Facebook already times out when and what people are saying in the video. The timing is always spot on, but the words are typically way off. This can take some time to edit if you have a longer video (all the more motivation to create shorter, social-friendly videos)
- The best part is, the captions appear immediately in viewers’ newsfeeds and will remain on the video as long as they’re listening without sound. But if a user clicks on the video to enable sound, those distracting captions disappear
- BUT: Be careful. If you boost a post before adding the captions you can’t add them after. So always add captions before paying to boost a post