A Detailed Tutorial of Facebook Creator Studio (New Edition)

Hey, welcome to the channel. If you haven't seen any of the other videos that I've put out about the Facebook Creator Studio, I did one several years ago. It's gotten quite a bit of views, a lot of questions, and they've done a lot of updates to that tool since then, so that warranted another video. Welcome, my name is Shaun. I run a company called Blue Cow Marketing, and I create this channel to give you some insights, some tools, some walkthroughs of some great assets online. Today we're going to be looking at Facebook Creator Studio. So the first thing, um, that has changed from before is you need to have a Facebook business account, uh, not just a business page. You just need to go to business.facebook.com. It is completely free and you can connect your account there and you end up with this Facebook Business Suite. So here we are in the Facebook Business Suite for our Blue Cow Marketing account. What we're going to be focusing on is on the left-hand side here this icon that says Planner. Okay, so I'm gonna go ahead and click on that. Now keeping in mind that I don't use this Planner in my business, so as you see, there's not content populated in it. We have another agency tool that we use to schedule our content. But within the Planner, once you come into here, you're basically getting a calendar view. So you can see at the top that the default is a week view. So from Sunday to Saturday here.. And, uh, we're recording this a little week leading into Christmas. So, uh, you know, if you see this before that, happy holidays. If you saw it after, well, I hope you had a great holiday. Now in here, if you had your content scheduled, we're gonna schedule a couple of them here in this video. You would see them in, in these boxes and you could look at them and reschedule them and drag and drop them. But there's two real points of creation in here. When you mouse over any one of these at the very bottom, you're gonna see this schedule um, button, so to speak, that pops up and you click a little arrow and you can do several things. Now, if you have an Instagram account and it's connected to your business page, then you're going to see the Instagram stuff in here as well. So you can schedule a post, you can schedule a story, which is awesome because there are other tools out there that don't allow you to schedule stories, but this one being natively to Facebook allows you to do that. And if you have a Facebook Ads account, you can also schedule an ad. Pretty cool, huh? Now on the top right-hand side, you got a very similar dropdown option, same options that are here. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna click the big blue Create button there, and let's get the magic happening. Now this is gonna pop up in a little modal box, and you can start on the left-hand side. Placements, that's where it's gonna go. Like I mentioned, if you've got your Instagram account connected like we do, you're gonna see that option here as well. So you can schedule to either your Facebook, your Instagram, or both, and just by checking those boxes that are there. Then down below you can put in text, so whatever you want to say. Now in this case what I'm going to do is I'm just going to do Facebook because I don't have an image that I want to upload to this right now. Um, so I'm going to go ahead and just type in text here. This is a sample post. So actually, you know what we're going to do? We're going to show you the— it's going to go into my Canva. Actually, no, I think I already have one downloaded here. Let me just go look here. I'm going to add a photo. Sorry about this. We don't, you know, we don't really try to script out all this stuff, but we're going to go and find something here. So our podcast content application, let's use that. So I'm going to add that image in there and let's throw in Instagram as well. So it's going to upload that image. Now let's actually make a real post here. So, um, have you subscribed to our podcast yet? If not, we have some really smart marketers coming up in 2022. Then we'll put a put a line, put subscribe and listen at. I'm gonna put in the link here. This video is not a promotion for this, just so you know, but it was a piece of content that I could put in here. And you know Murphy's Law, anytime you are trying to type in a video, your typing is horrible, as you probably just saw. So in the box here on the top right-hand side, you're going to notice two little icons. You got one that looks like a hashtag or a number sign or whatever. If you're older, you know, it could be the pound sign. This would allow you to click on this and actually see what are some trending hashtags that are going on out there right now. And these are pulling in trending as of today. Okay, so maybe this is National Horse Day and that's why that's trending. So you can easily either pull off some of those, um, you know, and a little content idea would be that you could come in here and just hit that and see what's trending if you're not in the know. And maybe you can create a piece content for that. Um, you can look at recent ones. Now again, we haven't scheduled here, or we can use saved ones as well. So we're just gonna go ahead and put in a couple hashtags here. Podcast, um, small business and market. Now you notice as I'm typing it in, they come up here as suggestions, right? So I could choose from that. You know, there's marketing, 37 million posts with that. So you can kind of get an idea for that. And as you go through this, When you did this, you would see recent ones showing up here, and if you saved any, they would show up there as well. Save you some time. These are some functions of other tools that are out there that are fantastic. So media, we've uploaded the image. Now over here we could click the edit button and you could come in here and actually add some filters, right? So you can go in here and change some of the, the functions of it if you wanted to. Let's say you had a photo, you can, you know, do vintage, black and whites, all that kind of stuff. You can do some basic cropping as well. So if you needed the vertical, horizontal, or square formats, Um, you can also tag people in here. So you got some functions for this. Uh, and you, you can split between Facebook and Instagram and you can do the tagging separately for that. Okay? So we're not gonna actually edit that photo. Um, if you need to delete it and redo it, you could do that right there. And there's that tagging button again. And as you go down, you could click on location. You wanna put a location in for that, but we're not gonna do that. Now over here, you're gonna see, cuz I chose both here, this was the text I put in. You have the option to adjust the text. For Instagram or for Facebook. So we know that we can't put the link in, uh, you know, it's not going to actually be a link. I don't mind having the text in there. It's a pretty easy URL. People could actually type that in and find it from that. But if you wanted to change up your, your text for, uh, Instagram differently than Facebook, you can do that right there. Okay, so once you do that, you're seeing your different previews that are here. If you're doing Facebook, you could come down here and you could turn— what's it say? To use this feature, please remove any media you've added to your post. Okay, so get messages, it doesn't allow us to do that at the moment. Then lastly here shows the link that's in here, so we can see all that. And I think it's if I took the link out of here, it would allow me to do that and just have it message me through Facebook Messenger. And then you can add a feeling or activity if you want. Now, if we're ready to go, we could go ahead here and click publish, which means it would queue up and it would fire out almost immediately. But what we could do is we could drop this up, or drop it down, whatever you want to say, click schedule post, or you can save it as a draft to come back to it later. You'll notice there's a button here next to the publish called optimal times. So we pop on this, and what it's going to do is you're going to pick the date here, if you want to manually do that, or it's going to give you some optimal times. And this is based on your followers and when they were most active on Instagram and Facebook in the last 7 days. So it's starting to use machine learning to figure out what's the best time for you to post. So you don't have to think, okay, I'm going to do it at 4 o'clock, 5 o'clock. It's going to tell you the optimal times for this platform are, let's say, tomorrow, or, you know, we'll do tomorrow there. And then Instagram, um, we could do Thursday. So you can pick different times for each. Now I'm going to click save and we see that the button changes to schedule post. We're going to go ahead and click schedule. Let's do its thing. And as you see here, there, they showed up in the feed under here. So when 7 o'clock tomorrow hits and Thursday at 5 o'clock hits, these are going to schedule out. Now you can go here and you can click on them. And bring them up to preview them. And you can click these three dots and you could go here and click edit and go back into the edit screen and make some changes. You could duplicate it if you wanted to do a variation on that. You can reschedule it, which will give you the option to pick a different date and time using the calendar option or even the, the optimal times. Or you can delete the post if you wanted to do so. Maybe there's something in the future that you're like, okay, I scheduled that for tomorrow, but it needs to go up now. You could go into that And you could click publish now and it'll actually pull it back and publish it to that right time, um, right there and then. You have the option to drag and drop these, so you can drag them into like the other day, right? So in here it's gonna say reschedule, and then it will pop up and say, okay, that's the date and time I wanna reschedule it. But I'm gonna keep that one there for now. So you've got your week view, you've got your month view here, so you can see a lot of the content that is, you know, scheduled to go out. Now what we're going to see here is we click on these, these are like recommendations. So let me just close this up. I don't have stuff scheduled at these date and times here aside from the two that we just put out. You know, these are ones that came out from other systems that we were scheduling, uh, and they'll still show up in there. So even if you manually put stuff on your Facebook page or Instagram account, it will still show up here as posts that are already gone out. But these ones here that show up that you haven't done that have the little star next to them, these are based on the recommendations, okay? So in here, you can go up and you can say, okay, it's recommending I do one tomorrow at this time. I can go and do that, and then I can start to build the post based off that. And these suggested times, like I said, are going to fluctuate week over week based on when your followers are online. The more active you are, the more engaged, these are going to get honed in, uh, even better and better. Okay, so that is the scheduling side here under Planner. One of the other things that you will want to know and take note of is your inbox. When you click on your inbox, when you have your accounts connected, this is where you're going to see, um, all your messages, your Messenger, your Instagram Direct, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, and a chat plugin if you have it in place. Here below that, you have posts and stories. So this is going to show you all of the different posts that have gone out, the stats on them, um, you know, any engagement that you've had. And you can look back and see that. So you got your published, you got your scheduled that are coming up— those are the two we just created— and any drafts. Below post, you have stories. So if you wanted to create a story, you can come in here and say create story. We can do again one or the other or both. I'm just gonna do Facebook for now. And I'm gonna say Add Media, and we're gonna see how this works with not vertical content and see how it actually handles it. It's probably gonna offer to crop it, but we'll see. Waiting for the preview to load. So yeah, so it's gonna do it like this, which is fine, okay, in this case. And then we come down and then we can add some text to it. So we're gonna go Add Text here. And we're going to type in, have you subscribed yet? And we're going to just rearrange and put this right up here. Let's rotate a little bit. Let's find a different font we like. The one thing I think they could improve is, you know, I mean, there's not too many here, but you could increase the actual ability to see if they see the font. That's what I'm trying to say, right? No, I was looking for something kind of scripty, but I don't think I'm going to have that option. And we're going to go stickers, and we got all the cool stickers here. So let's go here and see what we can get for a sticker that might— here, let me get that thumbs up. Where was that? I'm going to throw that old thumbs up on here, right? I mean, you can do probably better than I did with this just briefly. And swipe up link. So your story will not include the, the changes you made using the creative tool unless you save the changes. Okay, so I'm going to click save. Now this is if you had a story and you said swipe up, um, what do you want it to do? Okay, so we're going to appear, we're going to go swipe up link, and we can put in the website. So now I can go https://www. Amplify. So now if somebody was to swipe up— now I do see here it says you need at least 10,000 followers on Instagram to use the swipe up feature on there, okay? But on Facebook, it allows you to do it without that, which is awesome, okay? So now we can share that story right now. So I'm gonna go share. And it will schedule it up here. It's being published, and then it's going to go out here for the, again, the 24-hour period. Lastly, before we finish this video off, you've got your feed and grid here. So you can go into your, your page and you can see your feed, what it looks like on Facebook and Instagram. And then click on grid because people love the, you know, to see their grid. And you can see what it would look like. Now I haven't taken a lot of time to really, you know, plan out my grid. Some people like to have photo, text, photo and have this nice-looking grid. Frankly, I don't give a crap. You know what, it's, it's all about the content that's going out there. I don't care if it looks good in a grid format. It doesn't matter to me personally, but for you it might. But I think it's just getting in the weeds. So yeah, so that's how you can see that. And you got your Facebook photos here, which show you all the different photos and the albums that you have. And then any mentions or tags that you have— probably nothing. Well, there's a couple things going up here. So these are all the mentions and tags that have happened with you over the time. So you come in here, you can click on it, you can actually see here. So we had helped with an event here and we were tagged in this. We could promote it, we could say view on Facebook, or we can copy that link. So let's say we're going to copy that link and let's just see what else they'll give us here. Nope, it won't let us do that. So we're going to copy the link to that post and then we can come back here, we can say let's create a new post. And we're gonna go pop that link in here. Let's just see, I don't know if it's gonna queue it up. It might. Let's just see what happens here. It doesn't seem to want to actually show us the preview in the desktop here. Let's just see if it's if it flips over. I kind of hoped it would have, you know, Facebook, too bad you did that. It would have been awesome. I think one great enhancement would be to be able to come over here and see your mentions and be able to like make a post off of that content very easily. That would be a really cool feature. It might be there by the time you watch this video, I don't know, but at the time of doing this, it is not there. So my synopsis in all this is I've used a lot of different tools, um, scheduling tools, not only for our business but for clients' businesses. And when I did my first video about 2 years ago, Creator Studio was very archaic. It did scheduling and it did what it was supposed to do, but it didn't really replace other tools that are out there. And after reviewing this and seeing it in action and what it can do, I think it rivals a lot of the scheduling tools that are out there. If the caveat here is if you are only scheduling to Instagram and Facebook. If you want to get into Twitter and LinkedIn, you're going to have to use another tool. And what I recommend is you find a tool that could do all of that so you don't have to run two separate tools for it. But if you just want to handle the Instagram and/or the Facebook or both, this is a very viable and free option for you that I think is going to give you a lot of flexibility moving forward. So that's my look at Facebook Creator Studio. I thank you so much for watching this, and if you like this video, please give us a, a like, a thumbs up, leave a comment if you have a question, subscribe to our channel. Uh, just love to get our subscribers up, and we are doing more and more helpful content like this and diving in even deeper to different tools as we move forward. So again, thank you so much for for being part of our channel and have a great day.