Thanks Samir!
Obvious caveat that, like you, I'm not a member of the comms team so nothing i say matters in an official decision sense but I'd certainly be interested to see what others think (and I'm sure they would) :). It's also possible that some of the longer term decisions would have to be made by the Digital Communications (including SM) Manager when they get hired (but that doesn't mean we can't have something interim).
I'm generally against any specific "every X hours" type posting scheme. I think it hurts the posts themselves because they never get out at very good, targeted, times and instead just sorta 'get out when they get out'. That said I AM very much for trying to get posts out at a time that makes sense for maximum attention for the article. That means we should get better about posting things at good times for the region that the article is about too. If it's about work in India, it should go out at prime time for them (I know in the US this is generally 8/9am and I assume it is there but don't know that for certain) etc.
I should clarify that I would actually challenge the ida that the majority of posts here get sent out right after approval. From complete memory (haven't actually checked my email) I think that that Joe, Michael, Ed etc have all been pretty good at trying to spread them out (including at different times for posts focused on different regions) and trying to get them up at a prime time (whether spreading out or prime time is more important is... something I honestly don't have a whole lot of an opinion on atm..). So, while we can always do better, I do think it's important to point out that imo the appropriate "goals" are already known and people try to address them where it makes sense.
I also think that, if we're posting cross platform, we should post the message on every platform at around the same time which makes using Facebook timed messages tough unless it's a FB only post (which we certainly have sometimes, especially for country/language targeted posts). Because of that I'd personally lean towards something like
buffer (which I think I heard about from Joe and/or JamesF) which is pretty cheap and would let you schedule all of the posts at once (FB/Twitter/G+) rather then platform specific tools.
I do think it could be really useful, however, to try targeting some for prime time in other areas of the world. Especially if the post has a connection but even if it is more general we may want to try it since I know there are a large number of people (at least in our facebook likes) outside of the US :) For example the US is the #2 country at around 280k likes but India is #1 at over 5x that. (and Bangladesh is #3) the same holds for our engagement and our participation on Facebook. Also, while Egypt may be "only" #6 in the country list Cairo itself is #3 (Dhaka is #1).