Finally, a Social Media Posting Tool in Calendar Format

I’m always trialling and experimenting with social media posting tools. But last year, I decided that using schedulers was hurting my quality of work, as I just couldn’t find a decent one.

So many tools won’t let you post more than one image (yes really), and many of them require manual uploading of images, instead of pulling them out of the web link automatically. This made scheduling quite a long and boring task when social media is actually one of the funnest parts of my job.

Then, I was asked to trial ContentCal. I was happy to give it a go.

Why use a scheduler?

For some of my clients, I post from their accounts every day, but for others, it’s more appropriate to look at the month as a whole and decide in one sitting what to post and when. I look at all the events and national holidays and try to work my content around what’s going to be a hot topic on the internet at that time. It also means that my clients can get full coverage over the weekend, and get their content seen outside of work hours. If I ever need to go away for a few days or take a holiday, my clients know that their accounts will still be active.

It’s really important to not ‘schedule and run’ though, because if a page is just posting and not responding to internet trends or replies, the account can look like there is no person behind it running it, and so this hurts customer engagement.

Why I love ContentCal. 

ContentCal allows you to see all your posts in calendar format so that you can create a comprehensive marketing campaign.

You don’t just get a poster that organises everything in a list. You can take a holistic look at your entire marketing strategy, and work out where your social media posts fit in with new blog post ideas, email blasts, ideas, SEO and PPC campaigns. The whole marketing team can work alongside one another to deliver a cohesive message.

Campaigns

I’m a big fan of campaigns, they allow you to hit the market with one, clear message – perhaps it’s a product launch or something for mental health awareness month. Working with campaigns allows you to monitor the results afterwards and see which campaigns work best for your business. ContentCal have made campaigns really easy to work with. They used to run a marketing agency so they know exactly what a marketing agency requires.

Whichever campaign you use will show up in your desired calendar. So you always have a track of your marketing activity and campaign dates.

Dates in the calendar

Often my clients like to be a part of things like international women’s day. Using ContentCal I can make a note of the date of international women’s day which shows up on all my clients’ calendars. Or, I can just choose more specific events like mental health awareness week on certain calendars.

Approval scheme

My clients are happy for me to just go ahead and post, but if your organisation uses a stricter policy, you can have posts approved by up to 4 different people before it’s scheduled to go live.

If you have more relaxed clients though, I like how you can show ContentCal to your clients so that they can get an overview of your whole process for the month, which helps them feel more involved. It’s a much easier way of presenting information than using Google Calendar, Mailchimp, Buffer etc.

Re-Using posts

I used a tool called Edgar which allowed you to re-use posts, which is handy because it saves time re-writing posts that you’d like to use again. But using that tool was a nightmare unless you kept the content very topped up, it was extremely repetitive and came across as spammy.

I like how ContentCal lets you reuse certain posts, but gives you much more control over which posts you choose.

Analyitics

Analytics and reports can be a time-consuming task for marketers, ContentCal allows you to check analytic stats for the day, week or month.

The stats aren’t as comprehensive as what you would find on Facebook or Twitter insights, but they give you a good overview and a great simplified summary to show to clients.

ContentCal has been my favourite overall marketing tool so far. It’s going to be particularly useful to you if you are part of a wider team or offer more services than pure social media. If you would like to give it a try, you can book a demo here.