How I Use Co-Schedule, Drag and Drop Editorial Calendar for WordPress

As a professional blogger who works from home, I have a limited amount of time to write, edit, publish, and promote content on my blog in addition to promoting content from my tribe, linky party participants, and other bloggers. One of my biggest struggles was promoting my content and other bloggers’ content. I need to have everything in one place to ensure I don’t drop the ball on social media.

CoSchedule, an editorial calendar and social media management plugin for WordPress, enables me to do writing and promotion all in one place. Instead of jumping to Hootsuite in Chrome and Viral Tag in Firefox and back to Facebook in Chrome, I can finish a post and schedule the promotion in the post editing screen. If I need to grab a few teasers from the post, I can scroll up and get what I need and scroll back down again without leaving the post.

CoSchedule is a WordPress Plugin, easily found in the Add Plugin menu in WordPress. You can install the plugin and try out the calendar for 14 days. You won’t be able to schedule any social media in the editorial calendar beyond the 14 days, however, I think you’ll be signing up for CoSchedule before your 14 day trial expires. The monthly cost is $10. If you write a review of CoSchedule and refer other bloggers to the company, you can reduce your monthly payment.

CoSchedule’s Backbone: The Drag and Drop Editorial Calendar

CoSchedule’s Editorial Calendar shows up in your WordPress side bar or as a web app. I use CoSchedule while in WordPress to facilitate switching between multiple screens while working on posts. Any content before the current day and time shows up as greyed in on the calendar. You can click on the older content to edit it or create new social media promotions.

On my editorial calendar, blog posts show up as white boxes and the social media messages as pink ones. You can choose other colors in the settings. Your blog posts will always appear as white boxes. Authors assigned to posts show up with their gravatar image next to the post, and your social media profile shows up as an image next to the message. Since my future plans include bringing on more contributors, I know I’ll love the visual identification of my contributors on the calendar.

Creating New Content

When you click on the pencil icon on a day, a message pops up offering the option to create a new blog post or new social message. If you choose blog post, the screen above appears. You have the option of scheduling the time and day and author, putting in a title for the post, and category. If you want to start writing the post, you click on Open in WordPress which opens up a new view.

Older Posts

While I have enjoyed creating new content within the CoSchedule calendar, I have come to appreciate using CoSchedule to breathe life into new posts. As I improve old posts for SEO, I can immediately schedule promotion of the posts for now or a later time.

For example, I’ve been working on back to school content as part of my upcoming Back to School series. As soon as each old post is updated, I schedule social messages for August and September. If I run across posts that I want to run for the holidays like my party planning posts, I can go into the post edit view and schedule them for October, November, and December.

Social Messages

CoSchedule can send social messages to Twitter, Facebook, Google+ pages, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Linkedin.

Pinterest

When you connect your Pinterest account, at this time, you will need to connect individual boards. Since I use 2 other ways to schedule pins from my blog and other blogs in addition to CoSchedule, I use CoSchedule to pin to my Best of A Life in Balance board and my linky party boards. Unfortunately, the social message sent to Pinterest uses a funky-looking url in the body of the message which shows up in the pin description. At this time, CoSchedule is working on improving this social integration.

The best way to send a social message to Pinterest is to use the “Link Post.”

Facebook

CoSchedule will send social messages to a Facebook page, personal profile, or group (as long as you are the admin for the group).

Promoting Other Blog’s Content

As a linky party host, I’ve started using CoSchedule to promote features for my weekly party. Since the urls for the features are in the post, I can copy and paste the url into a social message while remaining in the post. It’s so easy to schedule these promotions for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+ pages.

Social Media Shares Analytics

CoSchedule just recently added social media share information for each post. At a glance in the calendar, see how well each post is doing across the social media networks. On the My Activity page, see which posts are doing well.

How Often the Stats are Checked

• 24 hours: Rechecked every 2 hours
• 7 days: Rechecked every 6 hours
• 30 days: Rechecked once a day
• 3 months: Rechecked every 7 days
• Over 3 months: Rechecked every 30 days

 More Tips for Co-Schedule

• Print out your calendar thanks to the Google integration and bring it with you.
• If your social message doesn’t publish, you’ll receive an email notification and the social message will show up on the calendar with a darker red indication behind the time and lighter red indication behind the message.
• You can filter what you see on the calendar according to status of post, author, and categories.

 See for Yourself

Meet Barb

Barb Hoyer has written 4364 posts.

After working in the fundraising world for over ten years, Barb is an avid runner, writer, photographer, parent volunteer, and lover of dictionaries and thesauruses. Wife to an engineer and mom to 5 kids, Barb lives in the suburbs of Philly. Her idea of relaxation is an afternoon on the couch with a stack of books.

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