As small business owners, we all know that social media marketing is an essential part of building awareness and growing your business. But, many of us (raising my hand of here!), don’t have time to spend hours a day jumping between social media platforms sending out different posts to our audience. When I discovered CoSchedule, my life in the world of social media completely changed! If you haven’t heard me say this before, I am OBSESSED with automation especially automation tools that increases productivity in my business. Especially one that gets me out of my super distracting newsfeed and back into work that lets me continue to grow and thrive!

Today, I want to share three ways I use CoSchedule as my go-to social media scheduling tool. From scheduling and sending blog posts (just like this one) without leaving WordPress to posting weekly messages to my Fireside Tribe, I’ve been able to save hours with CoSchedule. Not only does scheduling a months (yes, a full month) worth of social posts save me an insane amount of time but it also lets me interact with several different audiences in just a few little clicks.

#1 – Schedule Posts Without Leaving WordPress

One of the most important parts of my blog writing workflow is making sure that the post gets published in places where my target audience will see the content that I created specially with them in mind. There is no reason to spend hours on a blog, especially when you have amazing education content to share, if no one is going to see it. So, my first tip here is to make sure social media posts are part of your blog writing workflow every time.

As part of my WordPress site, I have the option to add a variety of plugins to my blog page to maximize the visibility and effectiveness of each blog I write. One of the best plugins that WordPress offers is their integration with CoSchedule. Instead of having to copy and paste into a totally different tab or window, I can save time and stay right there in the WordPress interface. Once I’ve completed the content of the blog, I simply scroll down to the bottom of the page and start a “Social Campaign”.

First, you will see your Dashboard for CoSchedule within the WordPress site. Then, you will find a small plus button in the bottom right corner of your “Headline” where you will given the chance to start a new “Social Campaign”

Then, it’s time to write and schedule the posts. WordPress and CoSchedule work together seamlessly giving you the choice to share the post via links, photos, or just text. I always select “link” so I can link the reader directly from my social post on Facebook to the blog. I share a small snippet of what they can expect to read on the blog and then send them to the full post so they can read all about the topic on the blog that day!

#2 – Sneak Peeks of Sessions & Anniversary Posts

One of my absolute favorite ways to use CoSchedule for scheduling social media content is for my wedding couples! After a session, I know that my couples are eager to see all of the amazing photos from their engagement session or wedding. Something that is important to me as a photographer is sharing a few sneak peeks with them AND with my social media audience. It gets the couple SO excited to see the rest of the pictures and gives the world a taste of the variety of photos I can offer as their wedding photographer. And I mean, who doesn’t love to look at beautiful wedding dresses and rings and flowers!

When I hop into CoSchedule, I can simply pull all of the photos from recent session that I want to share with my photography audience and schedule them throughout the month. It’s that easy. Then, I don’t have to worry that I forgot to share someone’s session or worry about going onto Facebook during the week to post photos. It’s all there in one place!

You can see here that I’ve queued up a post to share about one of the super fun moments at Mike and Kinsey’s wedding this summer!

#3 – Interacting with the Fireside Tribe

As an educator and owner of a Facebook group for creatives, it is important that I am not only sharing educational content like blogs posts but that I am interacting with my audience in a more informal, fun way. One of the ways I do this is through weekly posts to the group where I ask questions about their business, share motivational quotes, give tips for productivity, and encourage everyone to engage with each other. It is a really fun and easy way to get everyone in the group talking to each other and relating on all the different aspects of being a creative business owner.

BUT, instead of going into Facebook every day to schedule each individual post, I use CoSchedule to get it done for a full month in one foul swoop! It turns a task that might take 10 minutes every day of the month into a task that takes 1 hour for the FULL month. It is such a simple, time saving way to engage with your audience and not take too much time away from the other important parts of your business.

In this picture, you will see an example of one of my “Happy Hour” Friday posts with the custom photo I used every week for the post.

Pro Tip: I use the labeling tool in CoSchedule to label each of the posts with a different color for their respective day in the week so I can easily see them when I look at my full calendar view!

These are just three ways I use the MANY features of CoSchedule to automate, save time, engage more effectively with my audiences,  and increase productivity in my business. Social media marketing is essential for success in this technology driven age. So, finding ways to use it in the most efficient way possible will only help you continue to grow and thrive as a small business owner. If you are looking for a new social media scheduling tool, I highly recommend that you take a look at CoSchedule and start saving yourself hours in your business and spending more time doing what you love.