We have been using ContentCal for about a year now to manage social media posts for ourselves and our clients and have found it to be one of the best social media scheduling tools on the market. In fact, we were so impressed that we wrote a blog post about it back in September 2017.
We were surprised to discover that ContentCal had been working on a new version. We switched to the new app just over a month ago and, despite some initial teething problems, we’ve been very pleased with what we’ve seen so far.
So what’s changed?
The first thing we noticed is this is a complete rebuild of ContentCal. The look is more sleek and modern and it’s definitely faster (ContentCal lists it as up to 70% faster).
All calendars which you create for each client are now collated in a dashboard making it really simple to select which calendar you wish to view. The dashboard also contains a link to the help guide and helpful videos showing you how to create posts, campaigns, connect your profiles and customise your calendar.
When you are viewing a calendar the new layout makes it easy to apply filters, navigate to a specific date or access your calendar settings. You can filter your calendar by post state, social media channel, category tags and post creators. So if I wanted to see all Facebook posts created by Mary Thomas on the Concise Training calendar, I can with just a few clicks.
A useful feature that ContentCal have added is the ability to save hashtags. On each calendar, you can save your most popular hashtags. When it comes to adding them to a post simply add the # symbol and a list will appear of the hashtags you’ve saved.
Analytics now contains more information that can be useful for deciding the best time to post. It even provides you with a chart showing the performance of your posts at different times.
As well as an overall view of your analytics you can also break it down by each channel you have assigned in your calendar. You can easily see your audience breakdown and growth, engagement growth and your top performing posts.
In this ContentCal revamp, there was originally an option to select multiple dates for a post to be published. This was a great, time-saving feature which removed the need to copy and reschedule a post in order to repeat it. At the time of writing, ContentCal has temporarily withdrawn this feature due to it being abused but they hope to reinstate it soon.
One thing that has really impressed us about ContentCal over the past few months has been their customer service. Whilst you are using ContentCal, you can bring up a Chat Box so you can easily ask questions to the ContentCal team without having to navigate away from your work or having to open a new browser window. They are attentive and quick to respond– something that is always good to have when you are using a service for business purposes.
Need help setting up and using ContentCal?
Have you used ContentCal before or are you a current user and recently switched over to the new version? We would love to hear your thoughts. If you would like some help setting up and using ContentCal then please get in touch – we can provide a bespoke training course for you.