Queues are a handy feature that allows you to create any number of posts to go out at pre-specified times and days of the week, which makes them especially ideal for evergreen content. Select the day(s) of the week and the time(s) you’d like your posts to be published. Then add your posts to your Queue, and you've quickly created a plan for sending them out.

Even if you’re not scheduling evergreen content, if you know that you’ll be publishing on fixed times and days of the week, e.g., a weekly offer or update, Queues allow you to create your posts without having to choose the time and date for each post individually. That will save you time in the process of creating your posts!

The more you use Queues, the more valuable they become, and the more time you save scheduling posts. Many of our users who once weren’t using Queues now find them to be an integral part of their everyday routine.

Is a Queue the right fit?

You may still be wondering about the difference between queuing, scheduling, or repeating a post and whether Queues really are what you need.

The main difference between queueing a post and scheduling a post is that scheduled posts are aimed at a specific message going out at a specific time on a specific date. In contrast, a Queue allows you to quickly add posts that will be sent out on a specific day(s) and time(s) of the week, but aren’t time-sensitive.

For example, if you want to set up your next 10 weeks' worth of posts to go out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with weekly deals, motivational quotes, recipes, etc., you could absolutely do this with a Queue. But if you want to schedule a “Happy Birthday” message to go out on a specific day of the year, it’d be best to do this by scheduling the post instead.

It's also important to understand how recycling posts in a Queue works. See further details in the 'Tips and tricks' section.

Set up a new Queue

1. Go to Publish > Queues and click the New Queue button.

   

2. Give your Queue a name.

   

3. Select whether messages in your Queue will be recycled. This means that when you add a message to that Queue, once it is sent it will then be added back to the bottom of the Queue.

   Note: We suggest that you only set a Queue to repeat if you have a good number of posts added and will be regularly adding new messages to it. Queues with few messages and frequent times can be flagged as spam.

4. 'Contributors' are other users your want to be able to view and add posts to the Queue.

   Tip: If the contributor is not seeing the Queue within their dashboard, reset the Sendible Cache on their dashboard.

5. To start adding times to a Queue, select a day of the week on the left, and add a new time slot by clicking the + icon. You can manually add a time or you can set an Optimal Time by clicking the clock and star icon.

   Note: Optimal Times will only be calculated once you have been posting to profiles for 2-3 weeks so that the system has time to calculate this data. Also, Optimal Times will take into account the best time to post for all profiles linked to that user account, not for just a particular profile. For more information on Optimal Times, please see the article "Overview of Optimal Time".
6. To remove a time slot, select the x icon.

7. Once you’ve added the times you want messages to be sent each day, select the Save button. You're ready to start adding posts to the Queue.

   

Edit a Queue

To edit a Queue, hover over the name of the Queue in the Queue list and the edit icon will be displayed. If you select to edit the Queue, a pop-up window with the Queue's settings will be displayed.

Add a post to a Queue

1. In the Compose Box, you can click on the Queue icon and select the Queue you want to add your message to from the 'Smart queue' drop-down menu.
2. You can create a new Queue by clicking the + icon.

3. In addition, you can view and edit the settings for the selected Queue by clicking on the Settings link.

   

Posts with multiple variations

If you have composed a post with multiple variations where you have made edits for a specific platform, such as shown below, multiple posts will be created when you add that post to the Queue.

That means that in the example above where the Instagram tab has been edited, a post will be sent to the Facebook social profile in the next available time slot and another post to the Instagram social profile will be sent to the time slot after that. So a post with multiple variations will take up multiple time slots in the Queue.

If you do not have multiple variations for your post (no edits were made on a specific tab) it will be sent to all the included social profiles when its queued time arrives. So a post with multiple social profiles but no variations will take up one time slot in the Queue.

The Queues view

There are several other options for working with Queues in the dashboard.

1. The 'select all' checkbox will select all the posts visible on the dashboard. You may need to scroll to include additional posts.
2. Click the 'More' button to export your Queue's messages to a CSV or HTML file. You must check the posts you want to export and may need to scroll to include them all. If none are selected, the export will include all the posts loaded in the Queues view.
3. You can also pause or resume the Queue, refresh the Queue list, or shuffle the posts within the Queue.
4. Use the 'User filter' option to filter for posts that were created by a particular user.
5. Search for specific words within the body of the message or the social profile or Profile List name.

6. Queues will be shown as 'Shared with me' if you were added as a Contributor on a Queue created by another user.

   

7. Using the options directly on a message, you can delete, edit, and repost
9. If you want to rearrange your Queued messages, you can also drag and drop them in the list.
10. The initials indicate the name of the user account that added the message to the Queue. 

Tips and tricks for Queues

There are a few things you should keep in mind to keep your Queue optimal and healthy and to get the most out of it.

Recycling

Queues can be set to 'Recycle' posts, which means that once a Queued post is published, it’ll be sent to the bottom of the Queue so that it’ll be sent out again in the future. When exactly depends on how many posts you have in your Queue, and how many times you’re publishing in a week.

As an example, if a Queue is set up to publish a post once a day, every day of the week, and the Queue contains seven (7) posts and recycling is enabled, then a post which is sent out on Sunday will be sent to the bottom of the Queue and go out again the following Sunday.

If however, the same once-a-day Queue contains 400 posts instead of 7, then the recycled post would be sent to the bottom of the Queue would reach the top and be published again over a year later.

If recycling has not been switched on, then every post will only be published once, and once your Queue has published all its posts, it will be empty and unable to publish until you add new posts.

Diversifying a Queue

Because you’re able to recycle your Queue and have the same posts go out in a cycle, if you don’t add many posts to your Queue, it’s important to make sure that you either change them from time to time or “shuffle” them so that your posting schedule doesn’t become too repetitive. 

The best way to do this is either by adding new content or posts to your Queue regularly or by hitting the shuffle button to mix it up a bit.

Pausing a Queue

You can pause a Queue from its settings. To do that select a Queue, click on the edit icon and change the status to 'Pause'. To restart the queue, click the 'Resume' button.

Using Queues with RSS feeds

Many users who use Queues for publishing content also use RSS feeds and set up their RSS autoposter to forward their new items to their Queue. You can find out more about how to do this in this article: "Overview of RSS feeds and  autoposters".

Have more questions?

We'd be happy to help!

Please submit a support ticket with your questions. Providing screenshots or a video to explain what you expected or wanted will help get answers more quickly!