Scheduling & the queue

Two ways to schedule

Pick a time. Open a post, choose a date and time, done. Use this when the post belongs at a particular moment — an announcement, an event, something time-sensitive.

Queue it. Hit Queue and DemandBird drops the post into the next free slot in your posting schedule. Use this for everything else, which is most things.

The queue exists so that "when should this go out?" stops being a decision you make one post at a time. You set a rhythm once and then feed it.

Setting up your schedule

Your posting schedule is a set of time slots: a day of the week and a time, per channel. Find them at Settings → Posting schedule.

Slots are per channel, not per platform. Two LinkedIn profiles on the same account each get their own schedule, because they are different audiences.

The quickest way to start is a preset:

Presets seed every slot at 9:00am and replace whatever that channel had. Then move the times to where you actually want them.

How the queue picks a slot

When you queue a post, DemandBird walks forward through that channel's slots and takes the first one that has nothing in it. Slots already holding a scheduled post are skipped, so queueing five posts fills your next five open slots rather than stacking five posts on Wednesday.

If a channel has no slots configured, it cannot be queued to — the Queue button is unavailable for it, rather than being clickable and then failing. Give it a slot, or schedule that post by hand.

Posting to several channels at once queues each one independently, into its own next open slot. They will not all land at the same minute, which is usually what you want.

Posting variance

By default a post goes out at exactly its scheduled time. Every week. Forever. That is a recognisable pattern.

Posting variance spreads each publish randomly around its slot. Set it at Settings → Posting schedule, up to a one-hour spread — so ±30 minutes at the widest. Set it to zero to publish at the exact time.

Variance applies to the whole account, not per channel.

Best time to post

Once a channel has enough history, DemandBird can tell you which day-and-hour combinations your posts have actually performed best in — computed from your own engagement data, in your timezone, not from a generic industry chart.

You will find it in analytics, and you can ask for it from Claude or any MCP client with a question like "when should I post on LinkedIn?".

Treat it as evidence, not instruction. It is your history, so it partly reflects when you have posted rather than when your audience is best reached — a slot you have never used cannot show up as your best one. It is most useful for spotting a slot that is clearly underperforming.

Pausing

Pause stops the queue publishing without touching anything in it. Scheduled posts stay scheduled, and their times do not shift. When you resume, anything whose time passed while paused does not fire retroactively — check the content board and reschedule what you still want.

You can pause from the app, or by texting pause if you have SMS set up.

Who can change the schedule

Editing a channel's slots needs edit access to that channel. A read-only seat sees the schedule but no controls. On an agency account, a seat scoped to one client's workspace cannot change another client's posting times.

When a slot is missed

A post whose publish fails is retried, and if it keeps failing it is marked failed on the content board with the platform's reason. It does not silently vanish, and it does not block the slot behind it.

The most common cause is an expired channel authorisation. Settings → Connections shows which channel needs reconnecting.