Animate Social and Blog Scheduling with Coschedule

Animate Social and Blog Publishing with CoSchedule Editorial Calendar

32 Comments / Blogging Tutorials, Guest Posts, Social Media / By /

If you've ever managed a single blog, you'll know that sometimes you can't keep track of all the good ideas you have, let alone write them. And if you've managed a multi-author blog, knowing who's publishing what when can be a nightmare. One way to solve both of those problems and get strategic about your blogging is with an editorial calendar.
Animate Social and Blog Scheduling with Coschedule
I've tried a few WordPress editorial calendars over the years, but none of them really stuck. Then I started using CoSchedule, a blog editorial calendar that costs $10 per month per blog. Six months after my original review (which netted me a one year trial account), I'm still using it – and it's because of one killer feature: the integration of social publishing with the editorial calendar. I'll get back to that in a while, but let's have a look at how the rest of CoSchedule works.

Installing CoSchedule

Things have changed a bit since my original review. One thing that's improved is the process of getting your blog connected to CoSchedule. This used to be a complicated, multi-step process, but now you can be up and running in a couple of minutes. Sign up for CoSchedule, then return to the site and fill out a one-page form with your URL and blog login details. CoSchedule automatically creates an editorial calendar, imports your posts into it, and adds the CoSchedule plug-in to your WordPress installation. I like the fact that old posts are imported because it gives an at-a-glance view of what you have published, something that I've missed in other plugins I've tried.

Once the CoSchedule plugin is installed, you can manage your account either from the WordPress dashboard (there's a calendar icon and menu on the right) or the web interface, which are virtually identical. I find it easiest to use WordPress since I'm writing and publishing there anyway.

Role Management

Use the Team sub-menu to manage roles and team members (or access it via the settings menu item). When I tried it, CoSchedule imported all the authors on my blog at setup, but grouped them under my name. For me, adding them as team members and matching their WordPress roles to CoSchedule roles would have been a better option.

CoSchedule also allows you to invite new team members and set roles. By default the blog owner is the owner, with complete administrative access to all CoSchedule functions. The other roles of contributor, author, editor and admin have various permissions relating to editing, publishing and calendar viewing. The plugin includes an activity tracker to notify you of upcoming tasks and posts. There are also flyout menus around the calendar to help you search existing content.

Social Profiles and Integrations

If you want to make the most of CoSchedule, you need to integrate it with your social media profiles via the Social Profiles menu item. You can connect Twitter, Facebook (profiles, pages and groups), LinkedIn (profiles, groups and company pages), Tumblr, Pinterest and Google+ (via Buffer).

CoSchedule blog editorial calendar (4)

The Buffer integration is a recent and welcome feature, allowing you to benefit from Buffer analytics for your scheduled social posts and to share to additional sites not yet supported natively in CoSchedule.

The integrations menu allows you to plug CoSchedule into Bitly, Google Analytics or another analytics tool via custom query strings, giving you more insight into what's happening with your posts. You can also integrate your social and blog publishing into Google Calendar. For my taste, this makes my calendar a little crowded and complicated so I prefer to work with the dashboard calendar within WordPress. Here's a quick video overview.

Writing and Publishing

Writing posts works as normal. I use an offline blog editor for this, then upload it to WordPress. Every new post or post draft automatically appears in the CoSchedule calendar with automatic color coding helping you to distinguish among draft, scheduled and published posts.CoSchedule color coded calendar

I like to optimize my post title and description with WordPress SEO before turning to the CoSchedule box below the post to handle social publishing.

Social Publishing with CoSchedule

As I mentioned earlier, CoSchedule's social publishing is one of its best features. While you can click the pencil icon in the calendar view to publish a stand-alone social message, I tend to follow CoSchedule's own example and schedule messages along with posts.CoSchedule Dashboard Here's how that works:

1. Click the “new message” button to create a new social message. While this used to be very time-consuming you can now click on each social network in the drop-down menu in turn to see them all appear across the top and handle all of them at once.

2. Choose your post type – text, image or link post. CoSchedule automatically pulls in the title, permalink and image (if appropriate) and lets you preview the message.

3. Choose timing. I love the fact that you can use relative timing, scheduling social posts for set intervals after your blog post goes live. You can also schedule social posts for fixed times if you wish. Either way, you can cascade your blog post promotion and maintain an active social content schedule with little effort.

Simple, isn't it? I'm enjoying the ability to share image posts and have seen good social results from doing so.

Using CoSchedule – 6 Months On

Since using CoSchedule, I've gradually reduced my use of other social sharing tools as I no longer need an external tool to share my own blog's content. I still use Buffer to share other people's content, and unless CoSchedule gets a browser sharing tool (which would be awesome, but probably complicated) I'll keep doing that.

Is CoSchedule perfect? No tool is. One of my social messages failed to publish and I only found out when I checked the calendar. However, the developers have now addressed this and users should get an email notification on the rare occasions when this happens. 

That aside, CoSchedule is the single most useful plugin I have installed on my WordPress blog within the last year and I highly recommend it for bloggers looking to streamline blog management.

Have you used CoSchedule or another blog editorial calendar? What did you think?

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32 thoughts on “Animate Social and Blog Publishing with CoSchedule Editorial Calendar”

  1. Phillip Dews

    You have just convinced me Sharon and I am going to get coschedule for my blog! I find that my time management is really bad at times and this would deffo help me.
    I am getting better now though with the help of hootsuite.
    I kinda spread myself a little thinly at times with the amount of projects I got going on and my clients commitments plus running a blog but when I hear people say they don’t have enough time to do things I always say that they should make time!
    Imagine if Michaelangelo said that he did not have enough time to finish off the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. We all have the same amount of time as he had! We just need to learn how to manage it better!
    Thanks for convincing me Sharon! Top post
    – PD

    1. Sharon Hurley Hall

      Glad you enjoyed the review, Philip. As you’ve seen, I find CoSchedule incredibly useful for ensuring I share my posts socially at regular intervals. The ability to set it up when I write and forget about it is invaluable.

    2. Sharon Hurley Hall

      Glad you enjoyed the review, Philip. As you’ve seen, I find CoSchedule incredibly useful for ensuring I share my posts socially at regular intervals. The ability to set it up when I write and forget about it is invaluable.

  3. Sid

    Hi Sharon,

    First of all, thanks for this awesome post.

    Every blogger wants to increase his/her productivity. He/she wants to do maximum work in minimum time. The main reason being lack of time. Even, I want to utilize my time to the full potential.

    I was quite worried for a long time and was wandering for a good solution, thanks for this awesome tool, now I can work to full potential.

    Thanks,
    Sid

  5. Sourav

    Hi Sharon ,

    Many bloggers struggle with keeping a consistent presence on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. Great to hear that , CoSchedule can quickly write and schedule social media posts for all your different social media accounts in one place. I love this feature.

    Thanks for bringing this tool in my notice 🙂

  6. Ranbeer Singh

    Very useful plugin. will it work only for the wordpress site or even for the free bloggers using wordpress blog. Before that I use Hootsuite now I have to try this. Calendar scheduling is very nice. We can schedule for a whole week on one sunday.

  7. dan

    Love this post, not heard about Co-scheduler before however if it is going to be a time saver just like justretweet kinda thing then it is very welcome, we all know how time consuming posting can be so now co-scheduler can save you time for doing other things!
    thanks for sharing…

  8. David Weightman

    Hi Sharon,

    I’m a blogger and I too find it so difficult to manage my blogs, so for me your idea is very helpful. Maximizing time and effort through co-scheduler. I’ve been searching for assistance and I guess I’m lucky to have this chance, reading your review. Really Amazing!

  9. nagu akkina

    Hi sharon, seems like I was looking for this kind of tool , thank you for helping me in providing the required information

  10. Hiren

    Hi Sharon
    Nice review I was getting overwhelmed by lists and programs in an attempt to schedule the social media related to my blog posts, especially when creating a post that would post in the future. I tried CoSchedule and loved it. It was easy to install and maintain. The only negative is the need to resynchronize Pinterest boards any time you change your Pinterest password. Love the time and stress it saves. thanks for sharing article

  11. Robin Morgan

    Hello,

    Just heard of coschedule and it seems really awesome and I’ll include it in my productive tools list.

    The features are superb which we can’t even find in other programs.

    Thanks

  12. Alin Tanase

    Thanks for sharing! I would be curious to know if FB is receptive to this plugin vs using HootSuite. I have just gotten into the habit of using HootSuite for everything. But I heard that FB is a bit more particular about posting from outside services, so I try to schedule within FB. Who knows? Either way this sounds great!

  13. Karel

    That is really nice plugin. I am struggling if I should get paper calendar or digital. I wanted to build my own once, but I think I should try this 🙂

    Thanks!

  14. Tanmoy Das

    Wow ! This sounds interesting. Automatically publish is a nice way to save your times and energy. I am going to try it soon.

  15. Mark Anthony

    Thanks for the helpful post Sharon, I always used the automatic post scheduler for publishing content. Right now I am thinking to give CoSchedule a go.

  16. Chris

    This is useful for sure . Thank you a lot , it will help me with my blog as soon as I decide how to improve it . This tool will be one of the finishing touches for sure .

  17. Oloyede Jamiu

    Hey Sharon,

    I love coshedule.

    Its my favourite social media scheduling and editorial calendar app.

    Thanks for writing this.

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