Hey Startups, This New Tool Makes Social Media Super Easy

Back in 2007, I was asked to figure out what our business needed to be doing in social media. I was asked because I had headed up other transformation projects with success. But those projects I liked, social media on the other hand, I hated. Don’t get me wrong, I completely saw the potential for social media to promote our business and the project was a big success. But when it came to actually creating social posts, that was never my passion – professionally or personally. So the fact that I’m now raving about a new social tool is a bit unexpected.

I avoided social media like the plague – until I couldn’t

The years went by and I mostly avoided having to post things in social media. I tried out Hootsuite and some other social publishing tools, but always stopped using after a few weeks. When I became a company executive, I handed my Twitter credentials over to a social media manager and let them tweet on my behalf. Occasionally, I’d add a few posts from a conference I was at or a really great article, but for the most part I was far removed from being a social doer.

All that changed when I went out on my own to be a consultant. Without a social media manager, I was on my own to promote my new business. I thought about going back to Hootsuite, but procrastinated. I just knew that it didn’t really help me do social. That’s when a peer of mine recommended CoSchedule.

I looked into it and realized that this was the tool I’d been looking for. CoSchedule is the tool for people who know they need to get the word out in social, but hate doing social promotion!

Here’s what I love about CoSchedule

Templates

The template features is tied with ReQueue for my favorite feature as both save me a lot of time. What templates allows you to do is to create a campaign of posts and save it to reuse again and again. Within the campaign you can save macros for commonly used hashtags or attribution. Then when you are ready to promote a new asset, you simply choose the best template, paste in the link to the asset you are promoting and it populates everything according to the template. The only editing I do is to change up the actual post copy; which takes me only a few minutes.

Calendar

The calendar feature is very easy to review to quickly see what is going out each day on which feeds. I’ve color coded my various campaigns by the three social feeds I manage with CoSchedule. If I had colleagues, you can easily see which items need approval and of course tasks can be assigned too. Once a post has gone live, it is faded, but still accessible to click in to see results.

ReQueue

The ReQueue tool is definitely an awesome feature for anyone who doesn’t have “social media” in their job title. (Although it is probably awesome for social media managers too). Here’s how the magic works. When I create posts, I have the option of putting them into a ReQueue group. The ReQueue tool will monitor how the post does in its original publishing, then it will select from the group of posts to fill in the gaps in your social calendar.

You can put limits on each group as to how long of a period they should be used for or how many posts during a time period. So far I’ve been using it just for Twitter, but have created groups for posts from my blogs, 3rd party content, posts promoting my clients and posts promoting my services. By grouping them, ReQueue will never post too many of one type of post. Brilliant! This saves me a ton of time and gets the maximum value out of my effort to write the original posts.

Some other useful CoSchedule features

There are some additional cool features in CoSchedule that are definitely worth mentioning:

• Integrating your blog directly into CoSchedule so you can publish all in one place and further remove steps to promote.
• Their “Headline Analyzer” is built into their blog post functionality, but you can also use it for free here.
• Their Chrome Extension is super nifty for grabbing 3rd party content and creating posts.
• Additional integrations like Google Docs, Evernote, Google Analytics, Bit.ly and MailChimp that can further improve your workflow processes.
• Task management and approval process management are great features for teams to ensure brand quality. And the Dashboard layout is great for sorting and prioritizing your tasks quickly.
• Analytics to better understand what’s working so you can continue to optimize.

You don’t have to be a marketer to use CoSchedule

Once you set up a few templates, it is very easy to spend 10 min whenever you have a new blog or asset you want to promote and just put the info into the template. Then assign the posts to ReQueue and the best of your posts will continue to cycle – getting more out of your initial efforts without you doing any more work!

Of course, CoSchedule isn’t just for solo entrepreneurs and startups, they have some great collaboration features for organizations with large marketing groups. No matter the size of your company, if you feel you’re spending too much time in social media, I highly recommend you take a look at CoSchedule! Follow this link to get an extended free trial period.