How to take back your time with social sharing like a pro!

As an entrepreneurial author one of the many challenges I come up against is keeping up with the social sharing rat race. In an effort to ease this pain point I’ve tried several different scheduling tools. While each of them are useful in their own ways, until now, none of them covered all the necessary bases in one place. Leaving me with the need to manage multiple tools and do a great deal manually.

I distinguished myself as an “entrepreneurial” author because not only do I want to write, but I want my writing to successfully reach people. Sure I have a blog and this is where my content can be published to, but the reality is that if I only post it on my blog, chances are no one is going to see it (or at least very few).

This means that I need to share my content out via other means to get it into various social media settings where it will hopefully get shared out and seen by more people.

Because of the cumbersome process of manually creating & scheduling social sharing of posts and the lack of a single tool that would facilitate the process, much of my energy has ended up going into direct posting to social media and my blog content is suffering because of it.

Over the last few months I’ve been using a tool called CoSchedule with one of my other businesses and I have to say the experience has completely changed my outlook on social sharing.

I realize that social sharing tools may not be a top priority for all of my followers, however, for any of you who maintain ANY kind of blog and social sharing routine, I really do urge you to take a look. Even if you’re doing it for personal reasons as opposed to business reasons.

I will say right off the bat that there are two drawbacks with CoSchedule:

1. It currently doesn’t work with basic WordPress.com sites. (Your site has to be a WordPress.org self-hosted site.)
2. It isn’t quite as easy for resharing other people’s content and adding it to a queue as Buffer is. (Like for retweeting for example.)

If either or both of those points apply to you, then you might not be quite ready for CoSchedule. For the rest of you, read on!

So what do I love so much about CoSchedule, besides the fact that it gives me more time for writing and actually engaging with my followers?

1. Integration with your blog posts. Right from your WordPress editor where you create your content you can setup the social sharing messages and schedules exactly the way you want. This allows you to be specific on your posting times to each different social account, rather than using something like JetPack that will only post once and all at the same time.
2. Re-share with ease. There are actually two re-sharing options for your own content in CoSchedule. One is their new Requeuing feature. It sounds pretty groovy, but I’ll admit I haven’t used it as it is only available in the higher priced plan which currently is not in my budget! I’ve refrained from their free trial of it because I don’t want to fall in love with it if I can’t afford it. But the second option is still wonderful in my opinion, which is the ability to reapply share schedules to past (or current) posts for future dates. Which leads me to the next feature I love…
3. Social Templates. This is the feature that allows you to pre-setup social sharing schedules using social helpers as placeholders for messages and images. You then apply the template to a post, add the custom messages once and CoSchedule will auto-populate your post’s schedules with the info, dates and times that you’ve setup and all of that relative to a specific date. So you can apply it today, 7 days from now, 30 days from now… whatever you want as much as you want.  You can also go back and reapply a template to an old post that you want to resurrect too.

See CoSchedule in action with this great intro video:

CoSchedule from Garrett Moon on Vimeo.

There are actually numerous other features of CoSchedule that simply make life so much easier and that makes using this tool very enjoyable, but those three are the biggest highlights. But in addition to the features when using the tool, there are a few other aspects of CoSchedule that make it really shine. These include:

1. Review & referral program. They offer incredible discounts to your account when you write and publish a review of their tool and when you refer others who purchase an account.
2. Content. They provide incredibly valuable information to help you learn and understand how to navigate the landscape of content marketing.
3. Support. They are friendly, prompt and pro-active at providing the help and guidance you’ll need for a great experience.
4. Tutorials. They have a terrific knowledge base that will help you through all aspects of the features available.

So before this article turns into a book, I’m going to wrap things up by saying that for anyone at all who has any need for scheduling social shares of their content, CoSchedule is hands down the tool I recommend. Granted it’s not a free tool, but I can say with absolute conviction that it is one of the financial investments worth making and it is affordable for almost anyone. It will save you so much time in the long run.

For individuals I recommend the Solo Marketing plan and for anyone with a team, the Team Marketing plan. Access to the Social Media Templates is what really makes this tool outshine the rest. Then write a high-quality, thoughtful review and encourage your friends to sign up as well to help with the financial investment.

Take back control of your time, get CoSchedule, and enjoy!