Skip to Content

Easy Social Media Marketing with CoSchedule Social Templates

Easy Social Media Marketing is totally possible.

I’m going to show you how to set up a template for your blog that’ll let you schedule your entire social media marketing campaign in about 2 minutes.

Easy Social Media Marketing

Are you guys sick and tired of social media taking over your lives?

I was.

That, coupled with the fact that I have a full-time job and a million kids means I need to just get.it.done as quickly as possible, or hire someone to do it, but I’m not really ready to take that leap quite yet either.

You guys know I’ve been a HUGE CoSchedule fan for years now.

I’ve written about how I organize my sponsored work with it, and the first part of a Food Blogger’s Guide to CoSchedule too. It is such an essential part of my workflow, I couldn’t blog without it.

I was also fortunate enough to work for them for almost two incredible years.

During that time I got an intimate look behind the scenes at an amazing SAAS startup filled with super creative, driven, and motivated people who were spending their lives doing what they loved, and it showed. It was amazing, and I feel so fortunate to have been a part of that team!

I used to write a lot of the help docs for CoSchedule, so this is old hat for me, but while most of CoSchedule is super intuitive and easy – Social Templates for me are a little harder to explain and I think require some deeper digging to really make work well for a person.

This tutorial is going to show you my ideal setup for a promotion template. It could be used on new or old content that you want to re-promote.

If you don’t have CoSchedule yet, you can get a free trial here: http://coschedule.com/r/4011 That’s a referral link, so if you sign up using that link and eventually buy a subscription, I’ll get 10% off of my own subscription costs. You do NOT have to use that link. If you’d rather, here’s a link to their homepage – no referral included. I’m not writing this for the referrals, I’m writing it because it is something I get asked about a LOT, and a lot of people aren’t taking full advantage of this awesome feature yet.

NOTE: Social templates at the time of publication are only available in the Marketing plans and above. If you are a legacy user, you won’t have access to this. Legacy CoSchedule is cool, but personally I think the upgrade costs is worth it for this feature alone, but there’s also 10 other awesome new features you’ll get along with that upgrade and it more than compensates for the increased spend.

If the price tag is still off-putting for you, I’d encourage you to write a review. CoSchedule gives 50% off of your subscription for a year for publishing a review of their services.


Create Your Template

Start by going to a blog post or content edit window from inside CoSchedule, and find the Social Template icon above your social queue area.

How to set up social templates


Click that button, and choose, “Create a new template”

coschedule social templates

Once your template is created, name it something that describes to you what the template does, or what types of content it applies to. Right now I’m creating a general social promo template.

coschedule social template


Set Up Your Social Text Helpers

The next thing to wrap your head around with this, is the social helpers. You’ve probably used these already in your normal social queue to set up social messages quickly and efficiently.

You use short codes like {title} or {permalink} to have CoSchedule automatically insert that information when the post publishes. That means if the post title changes from the time you schedule your messages to the time you publish the post, you won’t have to go back and re-edit all of those social shares to match. CoSchedule does it for you.

With the text helpers section of the social templates, you only want to set up the titles, and you leave the actual content of the helpers blank.

This might seem a little weird at first, but it’ll all come together later.

Here are the helpers I’m setting up. In the first part of the screenshot are the CoSchedule default social helpers. These are the {title} and {permalink} helpers that are available in any social queue.

Under, are the custom text helpers that I created just now.

coschedule social templates

You can see I have two setup for tweets, and one for a Facebook and Pinterest share.

Keeping these separate allows you to customize your social message for every blog post you put out for the audience you are marketing to. Different things do well on Twitter than on Facebook, and this lets you customize quickly.


Set Up Your Image Helpers

Next we move onto the image helpers. Just like we did with the text helpers, you should leave the actual images blank. I created three here. One for long pins with text, one for long pins without text, and one square for Facebook. All blank.

CoSchedule Social Templates

You can now also add VIDEO HELPERS, which is bananas. If you produce a lot of video content, you can create multiple video helpers as well for your square facebook videos. More on that here after I have time to test and investigate it. Those were launched after I left CoSchedule, so I’m not as familiar with them as with the other features.


Set Up Your Schedule

CoSchedule social templates

Start on the “Same Day” section

Set up your ideal social media marketing campaign. Yours will probably be much different than mine if you are established and have a good content marketing plan in place. If you are just starting out, feel free to copy this general schedule and then tweak as needed.

My Schedule

I start out by pushing out on the same day and same time (as publish, or in the case of posts you are promoting that are old and evergreen, the same time that you schedule them) to:

  1. My blog’s FB page
  2. Twitter
  3. My blog’s main recipe Pinterest board

Tips

1. Use the little social helpers guide in the right corner of the edit box. It’ll help prevent typos and accidentally creating new helpers because you didn’t remember the code.

CoSchedule social templates

2. Make sure you are remembering your format when you create these messages. They’ll need to “flow” correctly when the building blocks are back in place. Here’s my defaults: {fbpin}{permalink}

{fbpin} = Fun description of the recipe in a couple of sentences
{permalink} = the link to your post. 

3. Schedule the messages that you want unique messaging or images for, separately. It is more work right now, but it’ll pay off in the end.

Here is what my “Same Day/Same Time” social push looks like:

CoSchedule social templates

IMPORTANT: Make sure to note the different networks I’ve sent to, as well as the TYPE of social message I am sending. I have Twitter cards enabled, so I always send link-type messages for that. You can tell the message is a link-type message by the little chain link icon next to the profile picture. Facebook always gets an image-type post, because on my page they perform much better than link-type posts. Your milage may vary on that, so do some experimenting.

Once you get through your same day scheduling by choosing the specific criteria to the network you are scheduling for, you can move onto the next day scheduling. I like to push out to twitter again, as well as my top 4-5 Pinterest group boards and any other relevant Pinterest boards that are my own.

Time Saving Tip:

When you schedule to multiple Pinterest boards, you can do it all in the same shot, like this.

CoSchedule social templates

For these ones I always choose the “Best Time” so CoSchedule can automatically pick the best time to send out those messages, and they also don’t get sent out all at once. No one likes to see your Pinterest feed full of the same exact pins, one right after another.

Now get to scheduling more messages! My next round I set up for 3 days after the first. Another “best time” round of pins.

CoSchedule social templates

The week after, I do another post to my Facebook page, and another tweet. You can keep going on and on and on if you want.

I have other templates to promote brand new posts that actually schedule out messages for months. I think it is a good idea to start small though, and figure out what works for you and your site and your audience before going all out with like, a full year’s promotion or something.

That’s it! Now you’ve created a social template. Next we’re going to go and apply it!