Unfortunately, with all the new platforms and strategies, it’s more complicated and time-consuming than ever. Or, at least, it was until I found CoSchedule.

CoSchedule is a premium WordPress plugin that enables me to manage social media posts across all my accounts, coordinate complex posting schedules, and keep the whole operation in one place. It all lives right in my WordPress admin center.

When Did This Spin out of Control?

Before CoSchedule I would have to copy and paste my way in and out of Twitter and Facebook. TweetDeck and HootSuite made this a bit more efficient. HootSuite also let me schedule things out. So did SocialOomph and Buffer.

But then eventually I had to factor Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, and others. Don’t get me started on including images.

There was too much jelly for the biscuit, as my daughter Megan likes to say.

And what about metrics and reporting? To figure out what was working, I was having to manually compile numbers from several sources. If you’ve been reading this blog longer than a week, you know I’m the sworn enemy of all tedious, repetitious, manual processes.

I needed an app that would combine all of these functions. That app isCoSchedule.

How CoSchedule Helps Me Tame the Social Media Beast

Here are three things I love about CoSchedule:

1. I can schedule all my posts from one place. Instead of jumping back and forth between apps or social media accounts, I can do it all under the WordPress hood. In fact, the app displays whenever you’re adding a post.

   Once I finish with a post, I can scroll down, select a few options, and load up my social media posts. It automatically handles the URLs and images.

   

I still use Buffer to share articles I think my followers will find useful. I also use TweetDeck to monitor my Twitter account and reply to questions. But CoSchedule is the tool I use to share my own posts

1. I can schedule all my blog-related social media posts at once.This is a major productivity win and saves me tons of time. I not only can schedule everything I want to post in one place, I can do it at one time at the same moment I finish my blog post.

   Instead of clicking over to a few different sites, I can populate a complete posting schedule in the CoSchedule app—not only posts for that day, but even reposts a week out or more. It even offers suggestions on how often to promote.

   

2. I can maximize traffic to my best posts. Archives are assets. But they’re not worth much unless we mine them. And one of the most valuable assets we have are the posts that have already proven themselves.

   CoSchedule tracks my most shared posts and lists them in one place so I can easily see how they performed across my channels. It also lets me schedule re-posts directly from the report so I can keep driving traffic to my best posts.

   

I’ve been using CoSchedule now for the last nine months. I can’t imagine going back. Here’s the bottom line: If you’re not using CoSchedule for social media, you’re overcomplicating your life.

My traffic has consistently grown year over year. In the last few years, one big reason for that is the effective use of social media. And CoSchedule now lets me get bigger results with less time and trouble.

If you’re interested in trying it for yourself, CoSchedule is extending a special offer to my readers. You can try it free for fourteen days.