Meet CoSchedule – My Favorite Social Media Tool

One of the things I have a hard time with is staying on top of social media. I’m a blogger and a web designer, so there’s really no technical reason I can’t do this stuff – but getting everything timed (and remembering to log in and post!) can be a bit of a challenge.

I’ve been playing with social media scheduling tools for quite awhile.

Being both a programmer and a web geek, I’ve tried out a bunch of tools including Sprout Social, HootSuite, and probably half a dozen others that didn’t leave enough of an impression to be worth remembering. And being a programmer, I’ve even custom-coded a few auto-posting apps to try and stay on top of things.

This is why I’m actually pretty excited about CoSchedule.

If you’ve never heard of CoSchedule, there’s a quick overview video here:

CoSchedule really isn’t a social media client – at least not in the sense that it lets you read your Facebook feed or your Twitter timeline. CoSchedule is all about helping you get your content onto social media.

CoSchedule integrates with WordPress, Evernote, Google Docs, Google Analytics, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. The basic idea is that CoSchedule provides an at-a-glance calendar to show you what’s going on with your social media campaigns, and a way to manage those campaigns from that same at-a-glance calendar.

I’m not as nitpicky with social media as some, but there are two basic sets of tasks that I found easy to automate with CoSchedule. Just these alone save me at least an hour a week.

Social Media Graphics

The first task involves some social media graphics I share every week.

Every Friday I have a graphic I share to a private Facebook group and Twitter, encouraging people to message me about their decluttering problems and stressors.

Needless to say, creating the same post in a social media scheduling tool, crafting the text, uploading the graphic, and all of the other associated work can take a bit of time. But because it’s the same graphic every week, it’s a great candidate for automation!

CoSchedule’s “social template” tool took that process from 5 minutes or so per post down to about 30 seconds. I just had to invest the 5-10 minutes into learning how to create a template.

Blog Post Scheduling

The second task has to do with getting my blog posts out to social media.

I blog about once a week on my other site, and I want to make sure that post makes it out to my Facebook page, my private Facebook group, and my Twitter account. For Facebook, I only post it once. But for Twitter I’ve found that repetition drives more traffic. So on Twitter I want to post it the day it goes live, the following day, one week out, and one month out.

Social templates let me do that with three or four clicks, right from within WordPress.

See For Yourself

Here’s a quick video showing how easy it is to apply social templates using CoSchedule:

The Icing On The Cake – Support

Some companies are good at support. Some aren’t. And even the ones that are good at support tend to not be quite as good at support for their “free trial” customers.

Not CoSchedule!

I emailed them for support one day. Note the timestamps:

CoSchedule

Four minutes from my email until they replied! Now that’s not every ticket – most take an hour or two for somebody to get back to me. But when was the last time you ever heard back from a company within four minutes?

And the best part about their support is that their people are sharp. They know their stuff, so you don’t find yourself having the ten-email back-and-forth that some companies put you through.

The Verdict

Personally, I think it’s a great tool. They have a FREE, no-hassle, 14-day trial. It’s a real free trial – no $1 credit card validation, no credit card even required. If you’re in need of some more social media automation, I’d encourage you to give it a try today!

Full disclosure: The link above is an affiliate link. If you sign up through my affiliate link, I get a bit of a discount on my monthly subscription. I hate the high-pressure sales pitches that usually come with affiliate sales, so I’m not doing one of those. I just think you’ll really like CoSchedule if you do the free trial!

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