What Is CoSchedule & Why Do You Need It?

Whether you’re a lone blogger establishing yourself or a business managing a number of clients, you need a schedule! When you’re starting out, it’s easy to assume that you know what you need to do. That may even be true in the beginning. Most of us can remember the first few sporadic blogs or the first month of Monday social media posts. Eventually, however, either your personal or professional life will pick up and suddenly things you know you need to do slip by.

To maintain your current level of content creation, you need to write down your plan. To accelerate it, you need a strategy and tools to help you implement it.

Tools like Buffer can help you schedule social media posts and Google Calendar is great for managing your schedule. However, the more tools you use, the harder it can be to see the big picture. Offering both solo and team options, CoSchedule takes a one-stop-shop approach to scheduling content for your blog(s) and social media account(s).

 

 

CoSchedule is a scheduling tool that connects your blog content and social media accounts in one calendar view. WordPress, Evernote, Google Docs, and Google Analytics can be integrated with Coschedule. This means that, instead of having to log in and out of various websites, you or your teammates can schedule your blogs through one interface. Likewise, you can schedule social media posts to post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Buffer, or Google+ pages.

 

 

CoSchedule’s primary view is a calendar, which shows a month worth of content and tasks. Click on the upper right hand corner of a day to create one of the following options:

1. Content
2. Social campaign
3. Blog post
4. Event
5. Note
6. Task
7. Social message

The largest group is “content,” which has various types ranging from wordpress blogs to videos to social posts. Content, if written, can be drafted directly in CoSchedule. However, users also have the option to attach content by uploading files (text, image, or video) from their computer, Google Doc, or Evernote. If you or your business uses Google Docs, this can significantly streamline your process. Editing the Google Doc will immediately update what you have placed in CoSchedule.

On top of blog options, it can have various tasks assigned to the content. Tasks are simple assignments with set due dates to help meet the final goal of creating the content. If you have team members in CoSchedule, these tasks can be assigned to different people. For example, one team member may need to draft a blog by Tuesday and then another team member has to edit the piece by Wednesday.

 

 

When you have a set series of tasks that must be accomplished in order to complete a piece of content, you can create a new task template. Once you create a template, you can apply the same set of tasks to each relevant piece of content.

For individual bloggers, this can help remind you to take regular steps towards accomplishing your goals. For businesses, this will help your project manager assign tasks in a timely manner. Individuals can update their progress on tasks so that, at any time, the project manager can review progress and take action as needed.

Each piece of content can have an assigned status: draft, pending, review, and published. This allows for a quick, high-level view of where all of your content creation is at any given time.

 

 

Using tasks can help you keep moving forward, instead of getting caught off guard by a blog that you thought you had more time to create. The analytics within CoSchedule mean that, even after you’ve published your content, you are still getting use out of the platform. Instead of having to visit multiple websites to see the analytics associated with your posts, you can review shares, likes, and comments through CoSchedule.

 

 

In addition to viewing individual social post’s analytics, CoSchedule allows users to view top posts in one place. Reviewing the reaction to different posts all in one place can provide a lot of insight into what your audience responds to across various platforms. Some posts may resonate with a singular platform’s users while others capture interest across the board. By reviewing the response in one central location, you and your business can get a better sense of what content to produce in the future.

Ultimately, whatever tool works for you is the best tool. At the end of the day, no matter how impressive the features a service offers are, they don’t matter at all if you and your team don’t use them. At Digital Marketing Sapiens, we have explored multiple ways to create and manage content so we understand that there are many ways to accomplish the same goal of producing regular, high quality content. If you are a visual person (like us!) who wants a calendar view to show you a detailed view of the content you or your team are creating, consider giving CoSchedule a shot.