Image credit: Loving Energies

That’s right, today, by the time you reach the end of this post, you’ll be free from social media.

Why do I say that? Well, how would you react if I said I found an incredible site… plugin… company… people… awesomeness…call it what you will… that will cut your social media promotion time in at least half?
You’d be pretty happy, huh?
So what am I talking about? Well let’s beat around the bush a little longer, just kidding.

I’m happy to introduce you to CoSchedule. A nifty little add on to your social media marketing plan.

Let’s start with some highlights:

The Calendar:

With Coschedule’s calendar you can see all of your scheduled posts, including your WordPress content.
Any post that is scheduled for a later date or post that you’ve written in the past will show up under its post date. Not only that but you will also see if you’ve scheduled for them to be shared on social media.
The layout is sleek and clean so there isn’t any clutter getting in the way of you and your social media. One place, for all your organizational needs.

The calendar also makes use of a drag and drop feature to change the dates that certain things are scheduled for. So instead of having to go back into the post, edit the date, save and then check it, you simply drag and drop it on the calendar.

Despite the sleek layout, you might be overwhelmed by the amount of scheduled content you have, but it’s ok! You can easily filter out content as you wish by clicking on the filters to the left of the calendar.

For those with some knowledge in social media you’ll know that the calendar alone is worth it.

Supported Social Media Platforms:

You can post content to all of the top social media platforms. Coschedule supports Facebook, Google +, Pinterest, Tumblr, Linkedin and Twitter. Yup,  all angles are covered =D and you don’t have to go back and forth from Twitter to Facebook to Tumblr to schedule the same piece of content.
You can write text, upload your own picture, add a link and hash tags. Once you’re done you can check how the post will look on each platform. You can then either let the app chose a time frame or specify the exact date and time that you want the message to post.

I’d like to highlight the fact that they support PINTEREST! It’s taken us quite a bit of time to find a smart system that we could use to schedule Pins and we finally found it.

Also, for those unfamiliar with scheduling content to individual sites, it’s a pain. Really, it’s like they don’t want you to schedule content, but Coschedule does =D. At the end of the day time is money, what’s your time worth?

WordPress Plugin:

If you never want to log in to Coschedule and prefer doing everything right after you finish writing your post, you can do so.

CoSchedule comes with a nifty little WordPress app that allows you to schedule that post to every social media platform supported. Want to promote that article as soon as it’s made live, and re-post it a month from the day it was written as well as? you can do so!

Be careful with doing that too often as you don’t want to plaster the same content all over the web, over and over and over again. People will start un-following you in a heartbeat. Having this right inside the post allows you to keep the flow going. You write your content, upload your pics, fill in any other info you need to and then schedule your content without having to leave the page.

How We Use It?

I’m not going to go into too much detail on this topic as everyone needs to build their own social media strategy, but what I will say is that you need to create a content schedule for yourself.

As travel bloggers we often have to work in bursts. We travel for a bit, then go into crunch-time mode and write, schedule, and promote the blog. We can’t be on top of our social media while on the road, it’s ok, Coschedule is beautiful for this. As a social media scheduler it’s seamless and has simplified our lives.

Since we’ve started using Coschedule I’ve been a lot more motivated with the social media aspect of our blog. Most social media sites have their own content schedulers but they’re all a bit clunky and time consuming. CoSchedule allows easy workflow, functionality and visibility of scheduled content. Now I have significantly more free time to focus on other aspects of running a blog. Like, oh, I don’t know, maybe creating content?!?!?!

If you want some more details on what is available on CoSchedule you can check out their intro video below.

Remember when signing up you get a free trial to test it out and see if it’s for you. After the trial is over you’ll be paying $10USD a month BUT there are multiple things you can do to get that cost down. For starters, you can refer your fellow blogger friends and family. For every person referred you save 10%. Eventually you’ll be paying close to nothing.

Happy CoScheduling =)