The question mark in the title is because this is actually my first test post using CoSchedule. It brands itself as the perfect way to manage your social media scheduling with WordPress as your base.
The concept is that you have a calendar where you can visualise your scheduled blog posts and all social media posts linking back to your blog. Plenty of platforms are supported (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+ Pages, LinkedIn, etc) and you can schedule posts to social media independently and the times that you think are better for each network.
Still, the killer feature for me is the ability to customise the social media posts according to special requirements of each network. For example you can have a short message on link post on Twitter and a longer-than-140-characters text on an image post for Facebook. And of course you can re-schedule additional social media posts after a few days.
In addition to these features, you have multiple users contribute articles, you can assign tasks to them and send them comments, creating a collaborative environment. In the technical side, all links can be passed through Bit.ly for click tracking and you can also include Google Analytics variables in them.
CoSchedule costs 10$/month which is comparable with other cross-posting services like Buffer and Hootsuite. You can check it out here http://bit.ly/Z2N3cZ (disclaimer: this is a referral link). I’m currently on the free 14-days trial, will report back on how it goes. :)
Update #1 (the morning after): So far it’s working nicely. This http://bit.ly/1mtVZmb is an example of an automated tweet (using the title of the post and a bit.ly tracking link), while this http://on.fb.me/1mtWexz is an example of a Facebook image post with a custom text, auto-posted at another time. I’m now looking forward to see how statistics (shares) are captured in the system.
Update #2: Testing this thoroughly requires that I write long-form posts, which I don’t usually do. Still, a note on statistics: On the screenshot above you can see results for this post. The Twitter count is 5, while Topsy.com finds 4 tweets with the URL of the post. The G+ count is 33, which matches the +1s on the counter on this page (see below). Depending on the privacy settings of the user, this isn’t necessarily actual shares. It’s good to have the number though integrated into the system. That sad part is that number of likes on my Facebook image post is not reflected. Further testing will be done. (Correction: In regards to Facebook, actual shares are counted, so I had zero because I had only made an image post. After doing an link post, the share count for Facebook went to “1”.)
Update #3: A note on rescheduling: It works. As you can see from the Topsy results below, my first tweet went unnoticed. The second one, two days later was picked up by two sources. ;)
Update #4: A nice find, CoSchedule actually tracked down G+ (at least) shares for all my past articles, as shown below for a post from 2013!
Final update: I’ve signed up :)
Tags: Facebook, Google Plus, plugin, plugins, Productivity, social, social media, statistics, tips, Twitter, WordPress
