Creating great content is only the first step in attracting visitors and boosting conversions. People have to be informed about the existence blog posts and articles. CoSchedule, an editorial calendar and social media planner for sites running WordPress, saves time and frustration when it comes to getting content seen.
I’ve tried many scheduling tools for blog posts, and have relied on a handful of simple plugins for years (like the popular Editorial Calendar plugin). Still, scheduling social posts in a different tool (I use Sprout Social) takes a great deal of time, especially when I want to queue plugs for blog posts not yet published.
CoSchedule sports a clean user interface that makes it easy to plan and schedule WordPress and social posts. It currently supports Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Buffer, Tumblr and LinkedIn. Want to schedule all your social media posts hyping content before it’s published? You can do that. Change the scheduled date for a blog post? CoSchedule adjusts the social posts appropriately. Toss a post back into draft status? It sees that, too.
Have an older post you want to breathe new life into? You can queue social messages on published ones. You can also schedule and reschedule tweets and such months in advance. That’s a huge time saver when you want to rotate content reminders and attract new readers down the road.
CoSchedule has many other uses, including team collaboration, tasks, commenting and analytics.
Users & Guests
The ability to have both users (those who can manage the calendar and social posts) and guests (those who can work on blog posts, but not social profiles) means you can collaborate without handing over all the keys. I’m actually a team member of another client’s account, so I can access and work on that company’s calendar right from my own CoSchedule profile – no having to log out and back in with another username.
Tasks & Comments
The ability to discuss and generate tasks on a post-by-post basis is great for productivity. Everything is organized and easy to manage. Here I show how it looks with a social post, but you can do the same with WordPress posts, too.
Basic & Advanced Analytics
If you want to know what posts do well, hop over to the Top Posts tab. There you will see which blog posts garnered the most shares across various networks. You can narrows this down to the past month and use it when plotting out future content.
The Marketer Level of CoSchedule (see below for an explanation) also supports Google Analytics and custom analytics.
Integration with Google Calendar
You can sync CoSchedule with Google Calendar. While you won’t be able to make edits in Google Calendar, you will be able to share the calendar with other team members (or your boss, for example), and also format the calendar for printing. You can opt to sync just WordPress posts, or include social post scheduling as well.
My Favorite Feature…
You don’t have to leave the WordPress dashboard to work on your CoSchedule calendar or to schedule social posts. A lightweight plugin provides what you need to schedule tweets, Facebook posts and more right within the WordPress admin. You can also view your activity, tasks and top posts.
Pay for What You Use
I love that CoSchedule has different plan levels, so you only pay for what you use. The basic starts at $10/month ($9/month if you pay annually) that includes 5 users and 10 social profiles. It utilizes team workflow and supports bit.ly link shortening.
Marketer plans start at $49/month ($44/month if paid annually) and include task templates, analytics and integration with Google Docs and Evernote. That means you can have guest or freelance bloggers deliver content via Google Docs and easily convert it to a WordPress post.
Higher-end plans are available for bigger businesses.
I’m Using It Everyday
I initially signed up for a trial because I wanted to review it for clients and this site. When I received an automatic email from CoSchedule, asking how my trial was going, I replied that I hoped I could finish tearing it apart before time ran out. Within an hour I received a human response, advising they’d extended my trial another week. That, my friends, is customer service.
I am now out of my trial, and am hooked on CoSchedule. Not having to hop out of one interface and into another just makes sense. So does the cost.
Do you use CoSchedule? Chime in and let me know what your favorite features are. Don’t use it? You can sign up for a 14-day trial. I think you’ll be quite impressed.
