Two features that sound similar and do different jobs. Scheduling decides when a post appears. Boosting decides how prominent it is once it is there.
Both belong to your team. Members always publish immediately and cannot boost.
Where to find them
Scheduling lives in the composer of the admin feed. Next to the post button sits an arrow, and its menu holds three entries:
- Save draft keeps the post unpublished.
- Schedule post opens the scheduling panel.
- Show scheduled & drafts opens the list of everything waiting.
Scheduling
Choose Schedule post, and a Schedule for later panel appears below the text with a date and a time, preset to the same time tomorrow. The post button now reads Schedule. The cross in the panel takes you back to publishing straight away.
The time has to be in the future. A moment that has already passed is refused right under the date field with "Scheduled time must be in the future.", and nothing is saved until you correct it.
Scheduled posts are checked every minute, so a post appears within a minute of its time. It then counts as written by its author, so automations and webhooks that react to new posts fire as if the author had just published it.
Publishing at the set time follows the same rules as publishing by hand. A post with a word from your Word blocklist is hidden and lands in the reports. If the forum has been archived or moved to the trash in the meantime, the post is not published.
Drafts
Save draft stores the post without publishing it. Drafts are shared: they sit in the same list for everybody on your team who manages the community, not only for the person who wrote them.
A draft cannot be opened again for editing. From the list you can schedule it, publish it now or delete it. So treat a draft as finished text that is waiting for its moment, and write it in full before you save it.
The scheduled list
Show scheduled & drafts opens Scheduled & drafts, with the tabs Scheduled and Drafts. Each entry shows its forum and, for scheduled posts, the planned time.
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Reschedule | Opens Reschedule post with a new Publish at time. |
| Schedule | On a draft, opens Schedule post with Publish at. |
| Publish now | Publishes immediately. |
| Move to drafts | Takes a scheduled post out of the plan and keeps it as a draft. |
| Delete draft | Deletes a draft for good. |
Check the list before you write. Two posts scheduled for the same morning are worth spreading over two days.
Why schedule at all
- Consistency. A community that gets something every Tuesday builds a habit. One that gets six posts one week and none for three does not.
- Timing. Your members are not reading at the hour you happen to be writing.
- Holidays. A week away does not have to be a week of silence.
Schedule the boring necessities, publish the reactive ones by hand. A welcome-the-new-members post can be planned. A reply to what somebody said this morning cannot.
Boosting
A boost does two things at once. The post carries a label with the boost's name, icon and color, and it moves up in Relevant Posts: a boost adds as much weight as ten reactions or five comments. In Newest Posts and Top Posts a boost changes nothing but the label.
You define the boosts yourself under Post Boostings in the Interactions settings. Add boosting opens Create Boosting with a Name, an Icon and a Color. Drag the boostings to set the order in which they are offered.
To boost a post, open its menu and choose Boost post, then the boosting. The entry only appears once at least one boosting exists. A post carries one boost at a time: picking another replaces it, and Remove boosting takes it off. Deleting a boosting removes it from every post that carried it.
Boost or pin?
They solve different problems and are easy to confuse.
- Pin puts a post above everything else, in every sort order, until you unpin it. Position.
- Boost labels a post and gives it a head start in Relevant Posts, where it still competes with posts that get more engagement. Weight.
Pin the rules. Boost this week's question.
Keep them rare
Both lose their effect through use. A feed where every second post carries a colorful label is a feed with no labels at all, because the eye stops seeing them, and boosting everything means boosting nothing in the ranking.
One boosted post at a time is plenty for most communities.
Seeing whether it worked
The analytics page shows posts and comments over time. If your scheduled Tuesday post gets steady engagement and your Friday one gets none, that is worth knowing before you write another twenty.