Every other Tuesday, we talk about the different tools available for writers to make life easier (theoretically 😉 ).
Today’s Tool: CoSchedule
Platform: web
Cost: variable; for most: $30/month (annual plan), $39/month (month-to-month)
What it does:
Allows you to send and/or schedule social media across multiple platforms easily and helps you with scheduling blog posts on WordPress.
That’s the short description of what it does. I’ve used other social media platforms like TweetDeck and HootSuite; and they’re great, but I like CoSchedule better. There’s no option for bulk upload, meaning that you can’t just dump all your social media posts into a spreadsheet and upload. But the inconvenience of that lack is inconsequential when put up against all the great features, many of which are not available in those other services.
Calendar view — this is one of my favorite aspects. I can see, at a glance, how many social media posts I have scheduled on any given day, what type they are (one-off posts, social media campaigns, pimping out my blog posts), and which platforms each are on. And if I need to change the date? Simple — drag and drop the scheduled post to a different day. That is so much easier than having to go in manually to each post I want to change and revise the date accordingly.
Social media campaigns — Got a new book coming out? You can create an entire campaign, scheduling social media posts exactly when you want them to go out based on your publication date (or any date you decide). And what’s more, even when what you’ve scheduled has run out, you can go back into that social media campaign and simply add more posts. Another fantastic thing about social media campaigns is that if you move the opening post, all the posts after will move relationally. So if you had set a later post to go up 5 days after the initial post and you move the initial post, the later post will still go up 5 days after, not on the original date it was set for. I can’t tell you how much time this has saved!
WordPress integration — When I create and schedule a blog post on my site, CoSchedule automatically picks it up on the next sync. Or I can schedule the post on CoSchedule directly. It will create the WP post and then give me a link to click to take me to WP to write the post. There’s also a WordPress plug-in that will let you create your social media for CoSchedule right in your Edit Post page of WordPress. Or you can come back to CoSchedule and do it there. However you decide to do your workflow, CoSchedule will handle it.
Analytics — The analytics for the basic plan aren’t particularly robust, unfortunately, but one thing that is very handy is that CoSchedule will show you which of your blog posts has gotten the most traffic and it makes an easy task of creating more social media posts for those blogs.
There are a lot of things I really love about CoSchedule that I haven’t mentioned, like the Headline Analyzer and all media kits and other educational materials. But I especially love the time it saves me. It’s absolutely worth the price.
Where to get it: Check it out at the Coschedule website!
Have you tried CoSchedule? What do you think?
Do you have a writing tool that you absolutely can’t live without? Drop a line to me down below and tell me about it!
Stay awesome!
Photos courtesy of CoSchedule.
No Comments