I normally do not post about how I run the blog but recently I have come across some really neat and extremely useful plugins that I wanted to share with folks. The latest one is CoSchedule.
CoSchedule is tabbed as the “social media editorial calendar for WordPress” and after using it for about a week or so I have to agree. Before I give you my thoughts, let me briefly tell you what it does.
With CoSchedule, you can create a standard or social media post within a calendar so you can easily see how your posts are laid out. Since you are working withing a calendar environment, you can of course schedule the time of your posts with some preset values or custom values you create. You can easily rearrange your posts by dropping and dragging on the calendar.
If you have a group of writers on your blog, you can create, assign, and schedule posts. You can even leave comments for them.
If you care about analytics, which you should, you can easily setup Google analytics and bitly to help track your shared posts. After a post is live, you can quickly see on the calendar what sort of reach it has had. Not doing well? You can simply create a new social post, put it on the calendar and see what it does.
The plugin comes with a free trial and then there is a standard monthly fee of $10. With this you get very good tech support and unlimited updates. I have already needed to contact them once and I was very pleased in how fast their responded. I have also found their blog to be very insightful and full of a lot of good information.
Before CoSchedule I was using a couple of different plugins to deal with social media and the editorial calendar and those plugins could not do as much as CoSchedule. The plugin works great, is fast, and has not significantly effected site maintenance or speed. Whenever you can combine multiple plugins into one, you are definitely better off.
The social posts through CoSchedule is what sold me. With CoSchedule you can post to Twitter, Facebook, Facebook pages, Google+ , LinkedIn, and Tumblr and you can do more than one of each. I have not seen any other plugin that can does this. You can create custom posts, use hashtags, and of course schedule them. This is the best feature in my mind. Right now I am in the process of creating new social posts for past articles.
The analytics aspect is also fantastic. I have data on general site traffic but to be able to see how each post is doing and its social media reach has been very helpful.
Overall CoSchedule has been a very good find and is a plugin I plan on keeping. I cannot say it has saved me a lot of time but it definitely has helped me extend and understand the social media reach of my blog. If you have a WordPress blog and want to help get the word out about it, CoSchedule is a great plugin to use for your social media efforts. It is definitely worth the investment.
