Two features that sound similar and do different jobs. Scheduling decides when a post appears. Boosting decides how it looks once it is there.
Drafts
Save a post as a draft and it stays yours: unpublished, invisible to members, waiting in the drafts and scheduled list.
Drafts are how you write three posts on a Monday and stop pretending you will have time on Thursday.
Scheduling
Instead of publishing, pick a date and time. The post publishes itself then, with no further action from you.
The time has to be in the future. A moment that has already passed is refused with an error message, and the post stays unscheduled until you correct the time.
The scheduled list
Drafts and scheduled posts sit in their own list in the feed, and from there you can reschedule a post, unschedule it back to a draft, or publish it now.
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 is a marker you attach to a post to make it stand out in the feed. You define the boosts yourself: each one gets a name, an icon and a colour.
Typical ones are the obvious ones: pinned reading, event, important, new.
Boost or pin?
They solve different problems and are easy to confuse.
- Pin moves a post to the top and keeps it there. Position.
- Boost leaves the post where it is and makes it visible. Appearance.
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 colourful marker is a feed with no markers at all, because the eye stops seeing them.
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.