If you are a business or a brand that has several social media profiles, you have probably heard of Hootsuite. Everyone uses it and everyone recommends that you use it, too. And it really is a very handy tool, especially if you have more than one social media account or you simply want to be able to schedule your updates and keep track of your channels. You can even find what people are saying about you and respond to those comments, tweets, or shares. In one place, you can see your Facebook, Twitter, and Plus accounts and you don’t even have to leave the tool to post or make a response.

With all of these features and with such a wide and varied base of users, would it even be possible for a new tool to edge in on Hootsuite’s market? If you haven’t heard of CoSchedule, now might be the perfect time to check it out. It’s still fairly new, which might make some people think “untested,” but simply means that they have their finger on the pulse of content marketing right now. What is CoSchedule exactly?

The New Content Marketing Calendar

If you have a content marketing campaign, you’ve already been told that you need a content marketing calendar. Most people use the calendar on their phone or a paper one, manually adding what content is posted when. This might be working—for now, but CoSchedule provides you with a better way. It is one part collaboration tool, one part calendar, one part tracking tool, one part social media manager. CoSchedule grants you access to all of your social media profiles in one venue and allows you to create the updates you want to create for those profiles.

Even better than that, however, it provides you with a “drag and drop calendar,” making it simple to see your entire content and social media calendar. Not only can you look at what has been done, you can look at what is happening next. You can also see the reach a certain post has accumulated in the time since it has been created.

One of the most unique features offered by CoSchedule is the ability to create your content (blog posts, especially), in their own editor. You write the blog post right alongside your content calendar, and then export it so it can be posted wherever you like. If you prefer writing in Google Docs or even in Evernote to create your content, they have already integrated those tools into their system. And if your blog is based in WordPress, CoSchedule can actually be synced into that blog, to make posting and tracking even easier than it was before.

It even uses some elements of Asana, so that if you have a team of people who contribute to your content marketing campaign, it’s easy to assign them tasks and to make sure that things are getting done when they need to be getting done. Adding notes or comments to tasks makes it easy to make sure everyone is on top of what they need to be doing. There will be less redundancy and better work will be getting done in the long run.

Is it the new Hootsuite?

Hootsuite has long held the first place in any discussion about social media management. But social media management and content management have started to evolve. You don’t just want a tool that lets you look at all of your updates and make new posts from one tool. You want a tool that makes it easy to integrate your social media and content marketing campaigns. After all, while content is the foundation of your content marketing campaign, you still have to market that content in order for the campaign to be successful. Most people do this through social media. With CoSchedule, you no longer have to use two separate tools for the creation and posting of your content and then another for marketing that content. Both are integrated into this one tool.

CoSchedule also has the ability to reach beyond just content marketing, into marketing in general. It has the potential for being the engine that runs all of your marketing efforts, including inbound marketing, outbound marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, advertisements, and beyond. It’s largely billed as a way to schedule, write, post, and market your blogs, but in reality, it has the ability to do all of that and efficiently manage any and all marketing you might be undertaking. The tasks feature makes it a great option even for search engine optimization, even if the tool itself does not have the function to track those efforts.

CoSchedule has made an effort to gather the best parts of task management, content marketing management, and social media management into one tool, and with a clean, streamlined design and user-friendliness that outstrips many other social media management tools, it is a no-brainer. They boast data-driven decision making, and while having all of your data gathered into one place might be overwhelming for some, it is the only way to get the full picture of your brand’s outreach efforts. And best of all, it’s free to sign up and cheap enough to use that even if you have twenty social media profiles you need to manage, you can do it for $120 a month.