CoSchedule Review – WordPress Social Media Scheduler Calendar

Without a doubt, CoSchedule is one of the few tools I’ve encountered in my 3 years of travel blogging that have TRULY been a game changer.  For those that are already using CoSchedule, you’re nodding in agreement with me.  For those that don’t know about CoSchedule, get ready for your mind to be blown.

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

1. You started your blog as a hobby but you’ve begun to take it seriously after seeing traction.
2. You continue to write but you wonder how you can grow your audience and traffic.
3. Eventually you realize that social media is the place to be in to build your brand and drive more traffic to your site.  Facebook is easy because you’re using it already but then you also have to pick up Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and maybe even Google+.  You start digging deep.  You might also discover an incredible community of like-minded bloggers on uber helpful Facebook groups.
4. There’s excitement all over so you try to do a bit of everything.  A little bit of Twitter…Facebook…Instagram…Pinterest…and maybe even Google+.  You might even get involved in the sharing threads on FB too.
5. Slowly all of this social media management starts eating up A LOT of time.

Before you know it, you’re spending more time tinkering with social media than you are improving your site and creating content.  Where did all that time go?

This comes from straight personal experience.  I got to a point where I understood the power of social but to be everywhere at once and maintain a consistent level of activity was dragging my productivity down.  What was happening was that my day-to-day consisted of trying to catch up with social.  On days I had a new post come out, things got even crazier because I’d end up spending a couple hours that day doing going into each of my social platforms and scheduling out my promotion in a very manual way.  It was that unsettling feeling of constantly having to keep up that I hated the most – like being on a treadmill and not actually moving forward.

There has to be a better way right??

CoSchedule to the rescue!

I’ll be honest, I was a bit thrown off by the name at first.  It sounds more like a tool that’s used when there are multiple authors involved but it’s so much more than that.

In a nutshell, CoSchedule is a super plugin that goes right into your WordPress site that not only gives you a fancy looking calendar that helps you plan your blog posts but more importantly allows you to schedule social media messages right in the post editor.

Yes we’re talking about SERIOUS productivity here.  Write, edit, schedule, Tweet, FB and G+ post all in one spot.  Hallelujah!

My workflow with CoSchedule

Without going into every single little fine detail of CoSchedule, I think the true awesome power of CoSchedule can only be explained through an example.  Why not an example for this exact post?

The beauty of CoSchedule is that while I’m in the mindset of writing an post for the blog, I can get all of my social messages out of the way right then and there instead of having to come to it after.

Step 1:  Write my post, add tags, categorize, upload feature photo, fill in Yoast SEO details as usual and schedule the post for the desired date.

Step 2:  Start with Twitter messages in CoSchedule.  All tweets are image tweets using the feature photo.  I fill it out so that I have a tweet every single day (minus weekend) for 2 weeks.  I usually time my tweets for the morning (8AM – 11AM) as I’ve found that to be the most effective.

Tweets all filled in on CoSchedule

Step 3:  Next I do my Facebook page message.  I’ve tinkered with doing it as an image post vs link post and haven’t noticed any major differences.  I have to craft the message a little different here because if it’s a link post, I remove the {permalink} portion.  I also remove all hashtags and handles.

Step 4:  I don’t have a Google+ account linked to Travel Blog Breakthrough but if I did, I’d do that next with a similar type of message as Facebook.  I find longer messages sometimes work well with Google+ so feel free to write more.  Also you can wrap an asterix (*) around text to make it bold with Google+.

Step 5:  I then work on the Facebook groups last.  Yes it actually can connect to Facebook groups!! There are several Facebook groups that allow self-promotion so I click all of the ones I want to share to and put together the same link post for all of them.  For Facebook, I’ve had more success with messages later in the day so I usually send them out at 3PM – 10PM.

And done!  The beauty in all this is that I literally don’t have to worry about any being on top of social messages when a new post goes out.  Once all this is scheduled, it just shoots out the message when it’s scheduled.  All I have to do is sit back and relax.

It does more??

Now I’m feeling like this is some sort of infomercial but I swear there really is more!

For me, I was totally sold on the fact I could schedule social media posts as part of my writing workflow in WordPress.  But yes there are a bunch of other neat features that I probably shouldn’t overlook.

1. CoSchedule has its own web app on coschedule.com so if for some reason you can’t access wp-admin, you can go to CoSchedule and do the exact same things as you would be able to in WordPress.  If you have multiple blogs linked to CoSchedule, you can see them in one spot on the web app instead of logging into each one in separate tabs.  Brilliant!
2. CoSchedule keeps track of all your social shares so whether within WordPress or on the web app, you can see how your posts are doing on social.  You can also see your top posts at any point which allows you re-share those that have done the best.
3. I haven’t even talked about the editorial calendar yet.  Through the calendar I can see every single blog post and social share all in one spot.  The genius behind all of this is that you can drag and drop your posts from one date to another.  Because all of your social shares are relative to the scheduled post date (i.e. one day later, one week later), even when you drag and drop your post to be scheduled on a different date, all of your social messages will also move accordingly.  Drag and drop works for individual social messages too! 
4. If you are collaborating with other writers, CoSchedule allows you to assign tasks to specific people and leave article specific comments.  You really don’t need any other editorial calendar tool after CoSchedule.
5. I use bit.ly as my link shortener and CoSchedule can connect with it to ensure that every social message goes out with my custom goaw.pl shortened link.

What could be improved

I’m totally nitpicking at this point but if I were to point out a few things CoSchedule could do better they would be:

• The biggest thing for sure is the fact that there currently is no integration with Pinterest.  That would be one less step I need to worry about if they had it built in.
• It’d be nice if it connect with Google+ personal pages instead of just the company pages but meh Google+ isn’t that important to me right now so not too big of a loss.
• Make it easier to add social messages to fill out the week instead of only having quick access to Day Of, Day After, Week After and Month After. What about 2 days after or 3 days after etc?

How much does it cost?

This is what the pricing structure looks like today.  I’m on the $9 per blog per month billed annually.  If you elect to go the monthly route, that goes up to $10.  For the value it brings and the time and stress it saves me, CoSchedule is totally worth it.  It’s also full access to everything at the price.  No stupid limits to the number of messages you can send out or restricted features.  The only big differences for bloggers is the number of social profiles, users and guest authors.

Try it for free for 14 days and you can tell me what you thought of it.

Getting CoSchedule set up is also a cinch.  It literally took me a whopping 10 minutes to get it all integrated.

How else can you augment this kind of automation?

Looking for more automation?  Don’t miss my posts about automating Twitter, Triberr and the power of Facebook Groups.

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