Having a website as the homebase for your business / brand is essential these days. With so much segregation and diversification of information around the Internet, your customers need a central hub where they can find all the relevant information that they need, even when you actively social share.
However, a social share strategy still needs to play an important part of your distribution efforts in order to get that information in front of as many people as possible. Think of social media platforms as the new postal service – you use them for distribution.
But sharing that information out via multiple social networks can be a major time consuming process, when you don’t have the tools in place to ease the burden.
[Tweet “The right tools will ease the burden of social sharing!”]
Who should read this?
Anyone who produces content on a website and/or creates content that they want to share out via social media.
Because social media scheduling can end up being a chore that we dread – but it doesn’t have to be.
The Discovery
Over the last few years I have played around with a few social sharing tools including, Hootsuite, Buffer and Edgar. All three of these schedulers are incredible. They shine in the spotlight for their specialties and they deserve much kudos for the advancements they’ve made. But a couple years ago I came across another option and it has without question become my #1 social sharing tool of choice.
To jump back a couple of years ago, when I finally took the plunge and signed up for a free-trial with Coschedule, things got busy and I hadn’t fully implemented the tool, but I had poked around and I was pretty intrigued. So as my trial was creeping to an end I emailed the folks at CoSchedule to explain my predicament and they were generous enough to extend my trial for a bit longer. Not wanting to abuse that generosity I set aside some time and really dug in to what they had to offer.
The Reaction
The outcome? I was blown away. These guys have really hit the nail on the head. They integrate with self-hosted WordPress sites in a way that is super slick and feels completely native. They also have their own portal that you can work through independent of WordPress and if you are using WordPress you can jump in and out of scheduled, published and draft posts direct from the CoSchedule portal with incredible ease.
I was so blown away, that I have continued to use CoSchedule for the last two years and am still loving it!
[Tweet “CoSchedule have really hit the nail on the head!”]
They have multiple pricing plans available with add-ons which makes creating the perfect plan for you a breeze.
They also have numerous features which make their tool stand out above the crowd. But rather than turning this review post into a book, I’ll let you review the various features yourself through their website at: Coschedule
Instead, what I’d like to do is talk a bit about the one feature that completely won my heart and loyalty over to the folks at CoSchedule.
Social Campaigns (templates) with Social Helpers
The ability to create social share queue templates results in a boat load of saved time! It also improves the quality of your shares. You can literally schedule massive amounts of unique shares within minutes.
Social media scheduling
Once you’ve created a blog post that you’re ready to share out, typically you would then go and schedule it to each account manually. Or maybe you use Buffer and create each of the shares in there, one at a time.
Now if we’ve done our research, then we know that we can share to Twitter with a much higher frequency than any of the other platforms and that with LinkedIn and Google+ you really don’t want to push it past once per week in most cases. So you logically create a line up of what works for you and your business, maybe it’s something like:
- Twitter three times per day
- Facebook Page every other day
- Instagram twice a week
- Facebook Group once per week
- LinkedIn once
- Google+ once
That sounds like a lot really, and if you were trying to share the exact same image, headline and text on all of those, it would be a lot and many would fail to post, or worse you could get flagged as spam. Well CoSchedule are brilliant because they understand that.
With their Social Campaigns and Helpers you’re able to setup each of those shares together as one template and you can create custom fields to use with your shares, which will make each share unique in some way.
This makes the process of using different images, headlines and hashtags (for example) super easy and fast. It means that no two shares would be identical and your social media scheduling just got a whole lot smarter and more effective. There are no limits to what you can do with this Social Campaign and Social Helper combination.
[Tweet “Imagine 32 social shares, no two alike, in minutes…”]
Once you’ve done the hard work once of mapping out your shares and helpers, then all you have to do is apply the template to a new post, edit a few pieces, and hit the apply button. It literally only takes minutes to schedule multiple shares over whatever kind of timeline you want, that could be stacked up in a week, over a month, two months, a whole year… you choose.
You also have the option to reapply your template to well performing posts effective any date you like.
It really is a smooth and slick process for keeping your social shares scheduled and consistent.
The folks over at CoSchedule are also really awesome to deal with. Whether you need a tutorial on how to do something, need to talk to their support team, or have a bug to report – they’re fast, friendly, and efficient. That’s not something that all SaaS companies are able to boast about, but these guys sure can!
This may not be your typical “technical review”, however, it is 100% genuine about how much I love Coschedule and why. I didn’t see much point in doing a breakdown of all the many features and exactly how they all work, because CoSchedule have that well covered in their own materials. Below is also one of their videos to give you a little taste.
CoSchedule from Garrett Moon on Vimeo.
So enough reading about how much I love it, head over to Coschedule and check it out for yourself. I really can’t speak highly enough of how we were able to streamline our own workflow because of the Coschedule awesomeness!
Social media scheduling really doesn’t have to be a nightmare!
If you have any questions after taking a peek, come on back and leave me a comment or send me an email at gazette@telus.net I’m more than happy to help!