Social media scheduling tool ContentCal is closing at the end of March 2023, much to the dismay of many businesses who have chosen to use this tool. There’s a whole wealth of tools out there to use for social media scheduling, and I can tell you, we’ve tried a lot of them.
Why use a social media scheduling tool?
Let’s discuss this first, because I’m actually a huge fan of using inhouse scheduling tools like Creator Studio or Business Suite. I’ve always found this works well for me, in terms of how I plan my content in advance and how much I need to schedule.
However, everyone works differently, and for our clients especially, I’ve found that tools like Publer or ContentCal have become invaluable.
Working with a range of clients to manage their social media, there are a lot of tools that subscriptions like ContentCal or Publer offer which really make the work more efficient.
So, while you’ll often find me shouting about the benefits of inhouse scheduling tools, as a business, we’ve made a huge shift to using Publer recently, which is a tool I can highly recommend.
Why to use a social media scheduling tool?
There are so many reasons, and as I said above, it can really depend on you as a person and how you like to tackle social media. For me, I tend to plan in advance and schedule what I can, but leave enough space for more of the day to day posts / behind the scenes stuff. So to answer this question, I want to focus on the features that really change how we’ve approached social media scheduling for our clients when using Publer in particular, and how it’s definitely made us more efficient.
- Automatically schedule posts: add new posts to the queue and Publer automatically schedules them as per predefined posting schedule
- Design with Canva within Publer
- Bulk scheduling of content which means we save a lot of time!
- Schedule Twitter threads and reusable Tweets – now, if you do use Twitter a lot, you may know that you can’t schedule a Tweet to repeat as it goes against the duplication rules within Twitter. Publer has a really snazzy tweak for this (spintax), meaning you can create a Tweet with 10 alternatives to a one (e.g. like using a thesaurus), so you can reuse it easily
- Post history is kept on Publer forever, so you can go back anytime and reuse them
- Amazing analytics reports which our clients LOVE – cutting down on our time hugely, and providing our clients with a very professional report
- Hashtag suggestions and best time to post suggestions – need I say more?
- Automatically recycle posts and schedule recurring posts – this again, a huge game changer for us
- Finally, as if for me Publer couldn’t get any better – content recommendations too, which I know ContentCal also used to do so could be a great feature while you are looking for your alternative.
As you can see, a lot of pros! We love the interface, and how easy it is to add new social accounts. As a small business, I’ve definitely been impressed at the pricing too.
Other Alternatives
I’ve talked a lot about Publer up above, but there are of course many other alternatives!
- Hootsuite – one I used to use years ago but found it wasn’t cost effective enough when the prices changed a couple of years back. It’s still a popular one though.
- SocialBee – we got a discounted price on this for 1 year, and although it looked great at the beginning, I never quite managed to gel with it – a tad clunky, and not exactly what it said on the tin.
- Later – loved this one to begin with, but again pricing became an issue as you wanted to add more accounts. I also found it a tad unpredictable and ended up using Creator Studio alongside it for Instagram.
There are also plenty that I haven’t tried personally but see recommendations for: Sendible, AgoraPulse, Sprout Social, Planly …
Conclusion
I would highly recommend Publer for an alternative to ContentCal, and as one that I have found to be excellently priced.
If you want to try it out, I’d love you to use our referral link: https://publer.io/gwecambrianweb
But don’t feel obliged, you can always Google it and not use our link too!
