#SMWTO November 12-16, 2018

How to Schedule Social Media Posts for an Event Week

To schedule social media posts for an event week, write every post you can predict before the doors open, load each one into a scheduler, and keep someone free for the moments nobody can predict. SMWi Toronto filled the week of June 6, 2016 with sessions in downtown Toronto, and a week like that produces more posts than a busy team can write on the day.

Why Event Teams Schedule Social Media Posts Ahead

Event teams schedule social media posts ahead because the busiest posting days are the days with the least time to write. Speaker announcements, session reminders, room changes and thank-you notes all land in the same few days, while the people who would write them are running registration or looking for a spare microphone. Writing the predictable posts early leaves room for the posts that only exist on the day: a line from the stage, a packed room, a slide that half the audience photographed.

How Far Ahead Each Network Lets You Schedule Posts

How far ahead each network lets you schedule posts depends on the network, and these limits come from each network's own help pages and announcements, read on November 1, 2026:

Those windows shape the plan. Five weeks before an event, LinkedIn will take a post today, but Facebook's 29-day limit means the same post has to wait about a week. Write everything early, then load it in waves as each network's window opens.

Do Scheduled Posts Get Less Reach?

Scheduled posts don't get less reach on Instagram, according to the person who runs it. Asked in a March 2025 Q&A whether a scheduler hurts reach, Adam Mosseri said scheduled posts "will not affect your reach one way or the other." In August 2026 he said a scheduled Reel goes into the system at the same time, and is ranked the same way, as one posted by hand.

The worry comes from an old result. In 2011, EdgeRank Checker looked at more than a million updates from over 50,000 Facebook Pages and found that posts from third-party tools earned about 80% less engagement per fan. Two months later Facebook said it had fixed the cause. Kontentino, which sells a scheduler, collected eight published tests since then, on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X, and none of them concluded there was a penalty. Most were small, so they can't prove scheduling helps, but they make a big penalty hard to believe.

A Posting Plan for the Week of the Event

A posting plan for the week of the event works best in three layers, and only one of them needs a person on duty.

  1. Before the week: one announcement per speaker, spread across the month, then reminders a week out, three days out and the night before.
  2. During the week: a morning post with the day's sessions, scheduled the night before, plus live posts for room changes, quotes and photos.
  3. After the week: thank-you posts for speakers, volunteers and sponsors, then a recap with the best quotes and photos.

The first and last layers can be written in one or two sittings. The middle layer is where the team's time should go.

Running Every Network From One Queue

Running every network from one queue matters once an event posts to more than two or three networks, because each native scheduler lives in a different app with its own time limit. A scheduling tool holds the whole week in one calendar, sends each post to the networks you pick and shows what went out. For teams weighing the cost, one affordable social media scheduler charges a single flat price from 5 to 30 accounts and spells out its catch up front.

References

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