Over the past few months, I’ve invested in and tried lots of new tools – and as I look back on all of them, there’s one that stands out in a big way: coschedule. The benefits of coschedule have been abundant – and I wanted to give you a peek into the magic.
I first heard about it on Pat Flynn’s podcast, Smart Passive Income (which, if you’re not listening to, you should be!) and it sounded like the answer to my dreams. The product I had wished for but didn’t know yet existed. A tool to integrate my team when it comes to content marketing and social media efforts – because I often have one person writing, another editing video, another creating graphics, and another writing social media.
While my team used to do this via google docs, it was cumbersome – and my BIGGEST complaint is that working in a google doc had a huge passive barrier – my team had to proactively OPEN the document to check their tasks and everyone else’s. Tasks are often dependent on other tasks, too – which meant lots of confusion about who had completed what and when, which ultimately lead to lots of emails.
Enter coschedule. A content marketing and social media collaboration tool for teams. I still have stars in my eyes. While the benefits of coschedule have been overwhelming, here are just a few of my favorite features:
- TEMPLATES. OMG TEMPLATES. I have templates for every workflow under the sun. Once you set them up, just apply templates to each piece of content. If we have a vlog, we can apply the video editing and youtube templates. Is it going in the newsletter? Slap on the newsletter template. I even have a workflow template for when we launch new locations.
- Workflows with tasks based on the post date. So I can say, “2 weeks before the post goes live X needs to happen,” or “3 days after the post goes live I want to share via Facebook using this text.”
- Links to wordpress. Totally synchs with wordpress and I can toggle back and forth between the two. I can work on the blog post from coschedule and work on coschedule stuff from inside WordPress.
- Metrics. Awesome, visual, sweet metrics. This lets you know which of your posts are hitting it big, and then easily lets you fill up your social media queue so you can share more about them.
- Email notifications. When Andrea finishes creating a graphic and checks it off the workflow list, Lisa gets a notification that the graphic is done and she can now stick it in the newsletter. I cannot tell you how much TIME this has saved us!
- The built-in notifications. So I open up coschedule and it’s immediate focus-time. I know exactly what I need to do to keep our content schedule on track. I can easily click on the tasks (to the right in the image below) to access them and get to work, and then check them off when I’m finished! And yes, based on the screen grab below I’m behind on a few things. – but how much do you love that coschedule reminds me to do my work!?
- Accountability. Checklists (workflows) with dates
attached. YES PLEASE.
I love coschedule and I know I’ve only just scratched the surface of what it can do for Femworking. If you have questions about my experience with it, leave a comment. You can also check out the overview video below or reach out directly to their team (who are fantastic, btw!)