If you understand the importance of promoting blog posts, consider transitioning to CoSchedule
If you’re reading our blog, I’m going to assume you either work with content regularly or you’re trying to learn everything you can about writing and promoting blog posts. I’ll be completely honest with you: Before I started working in the world of content marketing, I actually thought that working social media would be an easy job. I’d been using Twitter, Facebook, and other social media applications for years. Scheduling posts, communicating with followers, and sharing quality content simply couldn’t be difficult. Oh, how naive I once was.
If you think being a social media manager is easy, you’re not considering all the work that goes into promoting blog posts and sharing quality content with your followers. Do you remember the social media formulas we use for each and every article we write? I’ll give you a quick update (though, be sure to head over there and read the entire post if you haven’t yet). Each time we write a post, we also create dozens of carefully crafted Tweets and Facebook posts to optimize our content. Not only do we need to choose the right words to share, we also then need to schedule the content to post days, weeks, months, even a year into the future.
Let me explain my previous process:
- Write a post in WordPress
- After the post is scheduled, write the Tweets and Facebook posts in a separate Google document.
- Copy and paste the Tweets and posts from the document into Hootsuite, and then schedule the date and time for each social share into the future.
This process meant I always had three open tabs to keep clicking back and forth between when writing and promoting blog content. This is by no means a life-ending problem, but it did mean I was spending a significant amount of my work time completing what should be a relatively simple process.
And then CoSchedule came into my life, and everything changed.
When we decided to test drive the CoSchedule plugin for WordPress, we started by just using it on BuzzFarmers and Napa’s Daily Growl. It was immediately evident how the CoSchedule plugin was streamlining our processes, making our job easier, and we quickly began to recommend it to our clients, as well. It saves me hours of time a week completing tasks associated with promoting the blog posts I’ve spent so long writing.
How CoSchedule Helps with Promoting Blog Posts
1. In-line scheduling, so you don’ t have to keep switching tabs.
Remember how I originally had three pages I needed to toggle between? That need has completely disappeared. Not only does CoSchedule work as an editorial calendar where you can view scheduled posts, it also works as your stand alone social media scheduler. This all happens all in one place, folks. I don’t need to open multiple tabs or log in to three different accounts.
This is my biggest selling point. I can now schedule Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. posts while I’m still writing. If I happen to write a witty sentence that would fit in with our social media formulas, I just have to copy it and schedule it below the post in the CoSchedule plugin. It’s then ready to share on whatever day I scheduled it. Voila!
2. Smart scheduling in one click so you can save SO MUCH time.
I also love that you can schedule posts by time and date via CoSchedule. Since this is something I relied heavily on in Hootsuite, it’s so nice to have the same options in CoSchedule. Even more, CoSchedule offers easy scheduling. You can say you want the social post to go out between 8am-12pm, 12pm-3pm or 3pm-10pm. This way you can schedule a Tweet to go out from four accounts, and they’ll all go out at different times; CoSchedule determines when the best time will be for each account. Awesome.
There’s something you should know, though – you can do this even if the post has yet to be published. And if the publish date changes, the scheduled Tweets change with them.
We have a process at BuzzFarmers where we write, and then another managing editor will edit our posts (and social media content) before we schedule or send the content to a client. By being able to schedule the social media posts before sending them to our editor, there’s no more follow up on our part. The social media posts and the blog is ready, and nothing else needs to be completed.
3. Easy linking, so you don’t need to use any other service (although bit.ly hooks up to it!)
CoSchedule builds in a shortened permalink for each social media share. Now, the process of getting a shortened link isn’t difficult, but in my old way of working, I’d need to go to a separate website to get a shortlink and then copy and paste it dozens of times into my Google doc before even scheduling the posts in Hootsuite.
I no longer have to worry about the getting and copying shortlinks. Each time you schedule any social media posts, the permalink is already built in to each Tweet. CoSchedule is built to make the life of a managing editor who worries about promoting blog posts much easier.
4. Always current and up to date so you never send out a broken link!
CoSchedule is completely sync’d with the blog. If we change the title or URL on a post, as long as we’ve used their shortcodes that automatically pull in the {title} or the {permalink}, CoSchedule will pull in the correct information. Even if we’ve scheduled Tweets for a year from now, it will pull in the correct title and URL because it’s pulling that data directly from the blow.
5. Analytics, so you can see how your posts are performing.
It’s no secret that BuzzFarmers loves analytics. CoSchedule does, too. Once a post goes live, you’re able to view how many social shares, favorites, likes, and retweets each post has garnered. The analytics go even deeper. Based on social media shares, tops posts are identified. They’ve also mentioned that they’re considering adding single Tweet analytics, which we’re very on the edge of our seats waiting for because it will make testing our Tweets even easier. Maybe A/B testing will be next, who knows!
And it isn’t just the CoSchedule product that we want to shout about on rooftops – we also really dig their blog. They even made the BuzzFarmers 10 Best Company Blogs of 2014 list. Oh, and we gave them a shout-out during our first #FollowFridayVideo that we posted two weeks ago. Check it out! See – I wasn’t joking when I told you how much we love this company.
We’re dedicated CoSchedule users, and now, so are our clients. If you’re considering making the switch, don’t hesitate. The transition was seamless and smooth, and we couldn’t be happier with their product.
Do you use CoSchedule? What feature makes your life easier? Let us know in the comments!
