ContentCal

概述

ContentCal的故事与时间本身一样古老。好吧，不是时间本身，但绝对像社交媒体营销平台一样古老。188滚球地址就像十年一样，持续时间短得多比时间自己。不管。故事是这样的：

When brands and marketers realized the power of marketing on social media, everybody and their uncle wanted in on it—but not a lot of people knew how to do it well. As with any valuable skill that only a small subset of people were actually interested in pursuing and perfecting, social media marketing agencies began sprouting up all over the world, creating content and managing campaigns for brands. Some agencies, like ContentCal, grew to a point that daily, mindless chores and administrivia began taking way too much of the company’s time. Managing the deployment of content across multiple channels was one such administrative task that took a lot of time. The most obvious solution for something like this was to create tech-based tools to handle some of the load, and increase efficiency for anything that couldn’t be automated.

ContentCal began life in 2014 when CEO and founder Alex Packham left his job to launch a social media marketing agency. The creation of the software that would eventually become ContentCalbegan almost immediately, and took only two years to transform from in-house toolset to standalone SaaS product.

ContentCal is a multipurpose content marketing platform that allows you to plan, create, collaborate, publish and analyse your content - all from one central location. Its in-built approval flows also help streamline the process and avoid bottlenecks.

Before I’d had the chance to see a demo and then play around with ContentCal myself, I’d thought that this review was going to be incredibly tedious to write.我将如何围绕一个安排和发布内容的应用程序编写全长评论，我问自己。听起来并不多。但是后来我实际上看到了它的作用，我想知道我要告诉你的一切about the pl在如此有限的空间中处于范围。它充满了您不知道需要的功能和工具，直到您看到它们存在 - 一旦使用它们，您可能不想在没有它们的情况下生活。

---

Summary: Quick Jump Menu

---

价钱

Social media is often touted as an equalizer of sorts, giving equal voice to individuals and large corporations alike. But in the world of social media marketing, the best management software suites out there tend to be packed with features and priced for large and multinational brands. ContentCal bucks that trend as well, offering a SaaS platform that’s affordable to nearly any size business, even at the highest tier.

• Essential, from $37/mo ($30/mo when billed annually) dependant on users + calendars — 1 or 2 users and 1 or 2 calendars, 5 connections per Calendar, Custom Planning Channels, Instagram Grid view, analytics with PDF export, approval workflows, user permissions, support via chat and email.
• Advanced, $119/mo ($96/mo when billed annually)— 3 users and 3 calendars, with 10 connections per calendar, all Essential features plus Articles, pause content publishing, dedicated account manager, advanced approvals.
• Expert, custom pricing— a custom amount of calendars and users, 15 connections per calendar, all features in the Essential and Advanced plans, Contributions, unlimited personalized training.

除上述内容外，专家计划中的那些人还可以选择在其帐户中添加许多螺栓功能（我们的社交媒体收件箱工具）。虽然高级分析也可以作为任何付费计划的螺栓固定。

---

Ease of Use

With everything it can do, ContentCal is at its heart a visual calendar. The operative word here is “visual,” which means that—above all else—the software needs to look good. “Looking good” isn’t just a matter of aesthetics, though. With software, looking good also means a well organised interface that requires little learning curve from the user. ContentCal hits both of these requirements fully: it definitely looks good, and using it is utterly intuitive.

ContentCal的主仪表板有一系列的教程视频，这些视频几乎涵盖了平台可以做的所有事情。总而言之，总共有大约一小时的视频，每个模块都应该使任何用户加快速度。如果您需要返回参考，视频很容易访问。另外，您第一次进入ContentCal的任何模块时，有一个覆盖层为您可以做的事情提供简短的方向。

日历本身看起来比我在内容调度和管理中看到的任何人都要好得多。帖子以大格式放置在日历中，图像和字幕可清晰，而无需单击进一步。The platform relies heavily on color coding to give users an at-a-glance understanding of where they’re at with their queue: a thin line across the top of each entry in the calendar broadcasts the post’s approval status: green is approved, yellow means waiting for approval, red is declined, and if the line is blue it means it still hasn’t been submitted for approval.

The color coding also significantly improves the categorisation of each post. By matching categories with colors, a userdoesn'thave to go through every calendar entry and make sure there’s a good balance of content. Simply looking at the screen and seeing an arraycolors for the category tags gives a quick impression的whether you’re overdoing it for, say, How-To articles while you’re light on News.

许多竞争工具说它们提供了视觉日历，并且可以。但是，没有像ContentCal那样拥有该诺言的公司可以做出的诺言 - 日程安排和出版本身就是在课堂上。

---

The Features

ContentCal offers a host of features to support its primary mission of scheduling and publishing content. The color coding for ease of use is a big one, but the organisational aspect doesn’t end there.

There are two rows that run across the top of the calendar for further labeling; one for specifying the campaign that each day is covering, and one for writing notes to communicate with team members any other important information. The campaigns and notes are specific to each day, so you can get really precise.

One feature that highlights the thought that went into ContentCal’s development—and是一个省时间for cOntent Creation是创建平台所谓的摘要的能力。每个内容中都有很多重复的文本：也许您必须在每个帖子上放置某种免责声明，或者也许有一长串的主题标签需要附加到每个帖子上。使用摘要，您可以根据需要预定任意多种不同的文本字符串，然后在创建后时间，这只是从下拉菜单中选择适当的摘要的问题。

同样,你也可以输入所有your hashtags into ContentCal’s setup—maybe you don’t need a bunch of them tied together in one Snippet. You might just want to append one relevant hashtag to a post. By entering all your hashtags into the platform, all you need to do during post creation is type in#and a dropdown menu of all your hashtags appears for quick entry.

The analytics and reporting are also very well implemented.ContentCal的高级分析使您能够轻松地展示自己的成功，确定内容营销增长机会，并通过视觉，直观且易于使用的仪表板分析所有社交媒体数据。访问高级分析可以使您通过在有机社交，付费社交和网站上的表现的实时可见性来增加内容营销工作的投资回报率。You’re shown some basic audience information—how many followers you have, what audience growth has been like, the breakdown by channel—but the rest of the data is designed to help you improve your future effectiveness. The number of posts you’re publishing, your engagement, and your best performing times all help to refine your schedule going forward. You’re also shown the top performing posts, and have the option to repurpose them—schedule them right back into the calendar—if you like.If you are keen to get more sophisticated with reporting on content and social media performance, ContentCal offers an 'advanced analytics' add-on that lets you do just that. Advanced analytics gives a more granular overview of how each channel is performing, who is engaging with your posts, how well your competitors are performing and which pieces of content are driving conversions. You can also customise and download a variety of reports from this analytics feature, to share success and future planning with senior teams.

最后但并非最不重要的一点是，ContentCal的内容中心是疲惫的内容创作者的新鲜空气，寻求灵感，想法和在没有压力或背景的情况下制作内容的地方。可以在任何时候添加帖子，而无需选择频道或发布时间/日期。您可以使用此区域开始起草内容，请放弃您的想法以返回以后再回到，甚至创建可以一次又一次使用的模板帖子。如果您利用贡献，您还可以创建定制的表格，以收集无法访问您的内容式帐户的客户，客户和您的团队的内容想法和建议。所有通过贡献表格的提交表格都将自动添加到您的内容中心库中，以便您将其开发成惊人的营销内容。

---

Integrations

ContentCal提供了一些基本/可预测的集成，尽管这句话的开始是什么，但这并不是一件坏事。它们是基本和可预测的，因为它们是必要的：Google驱动器，Dropbox和Bit.ly Connections都在这里，这对任何公司来说都是个好消息。这些是必不可少的工具。

The biggest-deal integration ContentCal offers is with Zapier. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s kind of an integration middle man for apps that don’t otherwise work together. For example, connect ContentCal with Zapier, connect Zapier to Pocket, and now you have a way of creating new posts out of content you found there. The same can be done with Pinterest, Airtable, Google Sheets, Slack, and 1000’s or more apps.

---

tl; dr（又名结论）

In a market saturated with social media and content management platforms trying to be all things to all brands, ContentCal is a breath of fresh air.虽然ContentCal提供的内容和功能的广度已从其最初的调度和发布重点扩展到，包括，计划，协作，分析和存储内容 - 它已设法保持原始的简单性和易用性（以及价格较低的点）使该工具对用户如此吸引人。

不可否认的是，计划，调度和发布内容是乏味和重复的任务。ContentCal通过自动化大部分对管理品牌的社交形象的麻木来消除这些障碍。这使您有更多时间专注于实际创建（或采购）具有引起观众共鸣的优质内容。最重要的是，它是一种对小型企业和对大型企业一样有用的工具，并且也符合小型企业的预算。