There has been some discussion on post scheduling and it’s specifics. I wanted to outline it in a bit more detail so people who are interested can get a better understanding.
Firstly, as Nino eloquently put it, scheduled posts are written in stone. There’s currently no way to edit them in any way. These features are on the roadmap, but they don’t exist today, and it’s not clear when we’ll get to them. Fire a comment below if it’s a priority feature for you.
Secondly, posts are scheduled with the service information as it exists right now. I’ll explain this point in a bit more depth, starting with some background. Different services work differently. Facebook gives us a token to use which is supposed to be valid for 60 days. While for WordPress sites, we use your username and password to authenticate.
If you schedule a post to Facebook today, it’ll use the Facebook token we have today. If you schedule the post 90 days in the future, the token we have today should have expired by then. In practice, the token might still work, but it is supposed to fail according to Facebook.
If you schedule a post to WordPress next week, then tomorrow change your WordPress password, and then update your WordPress service on Composer, the post will fail. The old password will be saved along with the scheduled post, and there’s currently no way to change it.
The reason for this design was simplicity. It allowed us to launch the feature now rather than later. At some point we’ll update the architecture so that scheduled posts are linked to the service, and so if you update the service, it updates the scheduled posts.
For all these reasons, we recommend you only schedule posts 30 days or so into the future. In all likelihood, posts scheduled further into the future will work, but the risks of something going wrong increase the longer a scheduled post is kept in the system.
If anything is unclear, or you have any feedback, fire a comment below, send an email, or release a carrier pigeon in our direction. 🙂
Ok, my thoughts.
For the scheduled posts i believe you should make it a priority to add a “Delete” button and a way to be able to see All the scheduled posts.
As far as implementing an “Edit” or “Post now” options for scheduled posts, i believe that’s unimportant and more of a convenience than a necessity. Reason is, if someone wants to post something right now, they can just go and post it. And if they want to edit a scheduled post, then they can delete it and schedule again the Edited version.
However, without the ability to see all posts and a Delete button, if one decides to Post Now for a specific post, without having the option to delete the scheduled post, then the scheduled post will also go live on the date and time they scheduled it for, and that creates a problem.
And for the editing it’s he same thing. If one schedules the “Edited Version” of an already scheduled post, then there must be a reason for that. But without being able to delete the existing post which was scheduled originally, then it creates a problem, again.
So, “Delete” and “View All” for Scheduled posts — [Priority 1]
“Edit” and “Post Now” for Scheduled posts — [Priority 3-5]
That’s just my humble opinion. I have no idea how much of a difficulty it would be to implement any of these features.
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Now, another important thing i noticed. First of all a comparison between scheduling Twitter Pictures on Composer and doing the same thing on Hootsuite. The latter posts the picture with the ow.ly link shortener, which – when clicked – opens the image in a new tab which leads to ow.ly… That’s very very bad! You want to keep twitter users on your twitter account (and hopefully redirect them to your own site, or get a follower, retweet, favorite), not redirect them to some other site. That being said, you guys are doing great, the twitter shortener is used as the link, and if that link is clicked then it simply takes the user to the same post by expanding it and everything. That’s perfect.
However… and here is where it gets interesting… I tried Buffer recently, and i noticed one thing which neither Composer nor Hootsuite seem to be able to do. And i have no idea how hard it would be to implement this or why this happens on Buffer, but not on Composer and Hootsuite. Here is the example:
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Hootsuite and Composer on Twitter Tweet:
“My Awesome New Funny Picture” — “Twitter (or stupid hoot-ow.ly) Picture Shortened Link”
“EXPAND TO SEE ENTIRE PICTURE”
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Buffer on Twitter Tweets:
“My awesome New Funny Picture” — “Twitter Picture Shortened Link”
ACTUAL PREVIEW OF THE PICTURE!!!!!!
EXPAND TO SEE ENTIRE PICTURE
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See my point? It’s a HUGE thing as far as i’m concerned for people to be able to see a preview of the pictures i upload on twitter without having to necessarily click on the expand button. It helps get more interest in your posts, as we humans are highly visual creatures. And it just makes a timeline look better, i believe. And especially on Twitter where the attention-span of users is close to nothing, a preview of a picture you upload will go a long way to motivate them to see the entire image, and if they’re already there and see the whole pic, the retweet/favorite button is not far away. 😉
But, if it’s just an expand link (as it is now on Composer and Hootsuite), then all you get is the 125 characters (Excluding the picture link) to use as a “call to action”, sort of say… And if you insert a few hashtags in there too, then the number of characters you get to use in your tweet as a “Call to Action” becomes even smaller…
Again, i have absolutely no idea how and if that’s even possible, to have a preview of images be displayed instead of Just the link + expand/view photo options…
But judging by Buffer, it must be possible, somehow… Basically, what happens wih buffer is just as if you’re uploading the image directly on Twitter. That’s the only time it shows the actual preview of the picture.
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This turned out to be a really long reply… Sorry about that 🙂
I hope this info helps you out in one way or another… I tried to be as descriptive as possible.
Regards
Hi! Thanks for the information about posting using your service. I’m a newbie to social media (I actually rather hate it). Poking around I found your service. I haven’t used it for long and I don’t see myself posting actually 3 months out. I find it hard to post out a week (as you can tell from my account). It’s great to know I just need to schedule 1 day a month to set up the posting schedule for the next month. Thanks so much for going into the details. Have a GREAT day.