My First week with Co-Schedule, What I Love and Hate!

I’m using Co-Schedule free for 14 days to see if it does anything to my social profile. I’ve been asking people how they see me through my online profile prior to signing up and I’m going to ask again afterwards to see if the results have worked in both the digital and the real world, just for a comparison.

After reading Tim Ferris’ The 4 Hour Work Week and Listening to a lot of podcasts, namely Future^2, How to Start a Startup and Actionable Content Marketing there are more areas of research but these are the ones that stick out for me whilst I’m writing this blog. I noticed a recurring theme, “try to automate as much as possible, especially the things that are painful”. This is where Co-Schedule comes in.

What is Co-Schedule?

Its the #1 selling Social Marketing Calendar. What the hell does that mean? I hear you ask. Well putting it simply you can organise your social media and marketing content in a shared team calendar, post them to your preferred site and then market the hell out of it with scheduled sharing on all forms of social media. Microsoft, Home Depot and Rosetta Stone as customers to name a few, so it can’t be bad can it? 

Now I’m not going to go through every feature, mainly because I’ve not used every feature yet, I still have 7 days left so there’s time to get in as much as I can. I’ve been using it mainly to see if it can help to grow my social profile with limited (or no) input, using my previous blog posts.

Social Media Marketing

So here is how it works in my simple head 

Pre-Co-Schedule – Write a post on one or multiple social media sites, post it, it gets lost in the millions of posts on social media and you may get 5-10% of your people that actually see your really insightful and world changing 140 character message, with an inspirational quote as an image, of course. I may have even set up my social media to post from one source to another, and then moved up to Buffer to post the same message to multiple sites at once. I thought I was on top of this social media thing.

Post-Co-Schedule – I write something once, (this blog post for instance) I then place the link in Co-Schedule and select all of my social media outlets, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram etc….. I customise the headline message I want to go out and Co-Schedule gives me a preview of what it looks like and optimises my image size for each social media outlet with the best size for that outlet. Brilliant. I can also select specific dates and times for the post to go out, or let the Best time option select the time to post when most of my audience is online. Again brilliant, I love not having to think about these details.  Make your selections and hit the message button and the details are added to your calendar. That’s it, my social message is planned for the 30th between 7pm and 11pm.The above is to share once this is a Social Message – Co-Schedule as the name suggests allows you to schedule this post multiple times, for lengths of time which is Social Campaign. If I don’t describe it well these image will.

Select Social Campaign from the create selection box.Enter as much or as little detail as you want and create your campaign. Your then presented with a list of options for when you want your post to go out. As you fill out the details your previews and options for editing expand.Then click add message to get previews of how the message is getting out to your readers.Publish the campaign and low and behold your calendar is updated and your social media marketing campaign is planned in and scheduled for release. Sweet.

Now the headline is What I Love and Hate! about this app. I’ll start with the hate, but first of all, hate is a strong headline grabbing word, its not hate, its chances for improvement. 😉

I’m going to make a list for this section.

1. Using this on mobile devices is truly shocking, I use an iPhone and iPad for mobile but they are the products I have to hand most often and they are the most convenient for me as a social butterfly, for it to be bad at this is a bit of a turn off.
2. Price – $15 per month isn’t a lot for the obvious benefits, unless like me you have 4 kids and Christmas or a birthday coming up every month of the year. This is the Solo – minimum entry solution, 1 user/5 Social Profiles. It does ramp up to $359 per month for the all singing all dancing version, 25 users/40 guests/100 Social Profiles. 

That’s it for the Hate now onto the Love.

1. Being able to schedule my blog posts on a regular basis, this has promoted traffic slightly, its only been 7 days, these things take time to grow but currently I have increased my twitter followers by 5% and had a slight increase in people visiting my site www.LeanintoDesign.com, not big, maybe an extra 1-2% but its an increase I wouldn’t have seen without it and I have only scheduled 2 posts.
2. It’s great for focusing attention, I’ve created 21 blog post headlines since signing up with a view to getting them finished and out before the end of my trial.
3. The training videos within the site are amazing, quick simple and gamified with a “you’ve completed it” hero/thank you video made by the team once you have completed the training.
4. The actual website design looks great, it invites me in and makes me feel like I’m one of the team. You can feel the love these guys and girls have for their product.
5. The free resources are amazing I highly recommend checking out the blog and resources pages so much information you literally drown in it. Well I am anyway.
6. The Podcast – Simple, effective and quick, giving real Actionable Content for kick starting your social media.
7. The Headline Analyser – This has helped me to turn my rough blog headlines up from a score of 20 to a score of 60+ without any real effort. Honestly I would use this for every title you ever create for anything, ever.

Last but not least, possibly the best customer service and support I have ever encountered. I received an email from Garrett Moon, one of the co-founders, asking how it was going and if I had any suggestions. This may have been automated, but it didn’t seem like it, I felt loved, I responded as any Englishman would, with a long list of issues I had. We are known for finding the cloud rather than the silver lining. Within 12 hours I had a reply from Lance Hendrickson offering advice and asking how my presentation (mentioned in my email) went. What a refreshing change from getting one of a thousand people on the end of a line, or not getting any connection at all. This is Lance and Garrett, in that order.

 I’ll do an update in a week or so, maybe two, I’ll see how I feel, but I love this app so far and I’ll be watching the development as it moves to a, hopefully, more mobile friendly future. 

Feel free to get in touch via the comments below or on Twitter, I’ve also created a contact page which is new so please use it to let me know what you think.