Drafting Social Media Posts

HeyOrca

HeyOrca gives you several drafting and scheduling options to help make your life easier and keep you organized. Our drafting and scheduling options were designed with agencies in mind, which is why we offer schedule templates, schedule approvals, bulk posting and draft saving options.

The top two time-saving drafting and scheduling features that our clients love include:

• Content Library: Create drafts in your content library, which you can continuously schedule and publish for future dates.
• Bulk Actions: Use the bulk actions feature to populate your calendar with up to 200 pieces of placeholder content or scheduled time slots all at one time.

But that’s not all we offer to help you optimize your content drafting workflow.

Calendar-View Content Production

Create social media posts directly in your daily timeline and monthly calendar. You can easily drag and drop content to move it to another date, click on posts to schedule them on another date, or save posts directly to your content library at the click of a button.

You can also switch between month and week views on HeyOrca’s highly visual calendar to help you see your marketing strategy up close or far away. This allows you to view colour-coded content approvals, events, notes and memos easily to help with future strategy and planning. You can also click on posts and drafts to see social media mockups for supported and unsupported networks.

Media Content Library

Have content easily accessible in a neat library for quick social post creation. You can tag and label all media assets however you like. HeyOrca allows each client team to have its own media library. You’ll be able to keep digging for assets to a minimum, while ensuring that there’s no cross-contamination between clients, and that your team always uses assets that are on brand.

Edit Images in HeyOrca

HeyOrca’s web image editor can help you clean up, crop, or add filters or stickers to your images, which you can then schedule into your calendar. Clients will see the post mocked up exactly as it will appear when it’s published, which makes content approval a snap.

Save Drafts for Later

Not quite ready to post yet? Save your drafts for later by putting them into your content library. Your drafts are stored indefinitely as you tweak them to perfection. Once you’re satisfied, posts can then be published at any time, or kept for future re-posting.

Tag and Colour-Code by Status

Need to quickly know which post are drafts, which are awaiting client approval, which are approved, and which have been rejected? HeyOrca applies a handy colour-coding system that marks individual posts by approval status on every calendar.

Not only that, you can organize, search, and manage content in your calendar and content library by tagging it, or by marking it with event strips. That way, you can sort through your content drafts to easily locate and share paid media, marketing campaigns, social channels, approvals, and events with your team and clients.

You can easily see which posts are ready to go and which ones are still in development. This helps you put everything into context in a highly visual way.

CoSchedule

CoSchedule helps marketers plan and schedule on a daily basis. You may pick the date that the social media post should be published (or what day the project/campaign should start), and CoSchedule will prompt you to fill in the details from there.

Reusable Social Templates

If you stick to a certain schedule when promoting blog posts or other projects, CoSchedule lets you easily apply this schedule using schedule templates. These templates can be reused an unlimited number of times. You can also tweak them to fit individual situations.

Custom Colour-Coding

You can apply visual organization to your drafts by creating colour coding schemes for them. This makes it easy to categorize drafts at a glance. Colour coding can help you prioritize content, and organize campaigns by client, campaign, or whatever else your agency needs.

Upload Social Media Posts

CoSchedule lets you upload up to 365 social messages at a time. Once social posts are uploaded, you can then add finishing touches like links, videos and images before setting them to a schedule.

Tags

CoSchedule allows you to use tags to label projects, as opposed to specific social media posts. This allows you to find groups of social media posts or events, but not specific ones within the larger campaign.

What’s better for agency marketers?

Both platforms have their own advantages. Both CoSchedule and HeyOrca offer similar content drafting and calendar markup features.

CoSchedule does focus on creating posts in bulk as much as they focus on rescheduling content in bulk. In contrast, HeyOrca’s features help improve the user experience for drafting single posts that can be continuously altered, scheduled in bulk, and then updated conveniently in the future.

Agency marketers who work with multiple clients will probably love both platforms. However, the little things (like having easy access and well-organized content and media libraries for each client team) will go a long way for agency marketers who want (and desperately need) to stay organized while scheduling lots of content.

Scheduling Social Media Posts

HeyOrca

HeyOrca gives you a plethora of content scheduling options so you can schedule your social media content for any day or time. Schedule content from the post-planning window, or from the content library.

Content Library

Our content library feature makes scheduling posts for later dates easy. Each client team has its own content library where you can store evergreen content or posts not yet ready to be scheduled.

Easily View Content Stages and Change Your Schedule

HeyOrca’s interface lets you view scheduled posts and unapproved drafts in either a weekly or monthly calendar view.

Need to change the date of a scheduled post? Just enter calendar view and drag and drop the post onto another day, or reschedule by clicking on the content.

Copy Your Preferred Schedule

Agencies that service multiple clients within the same organization (or a different one) can copy calendar schedules (using out advanced copy feature) across teams without having to recreate schedules each time. That’s right, you can gain client approval for schedules as well as content.

This makes it very easy to gain client schedule approval, and copy posts from one client team to another and save loads of time. It also makes it easy to get social schedule times approved months in advance before big events, or before things get hectic.

Content Approvals

With HeyOrca, you never worry about publishing content before it’s viewed by all your stakeholders. This feature is a lifesaver for agencies and their clients. Only approved content will (and can) be published using HeyOrca.

You can choose roles and permissions for your colleagues and clients to control how much approval and copywriting/editing power everyone has. You can set approval levels (internally or externally) to ensure that all necessary approvals are captured before a post is published.

CoSchedule

With CoSchedule, you can schedule social media posts directly on your content calendar just as you would with any other social media management platform. You can create single social media posts, or use the same interface to start a campaign.

CoSchedule Campaigns let you schedule multiple posts in advance of the date. Those posts will not publish until the day of posting, so there is time to adjust and make changes.

Content Approval

You can get the streamlined content approval ball rolling for your internal marketing team using CoSchedule.

However, this is limited to internal use only. You will still have to gain client content approvals the old-fashioned way by spreadsheets, screenshots, docs, emails, or by exporting the calendar view. The calendar view is limited to read-only without approval features, although comments can be made on the calendar by external viewers.

Despite that, only those who have a Professional or Enterprise plan may use the internal approval feature. So, if your team doesn’t need to manage so many social profiles, then you can’t work with internal approvals at all.

Post Optimization

Coschedule offers some cool auto-optimized posting features. They offer time suggestions for posting content based on common knowledge and best practices. This allows marketers to some freed-up headspace. You don’t have to think about the best times to post social media content.

Keep in mind that automated time suggestions may conflict with your client and audience needs and behaviours. They don’t guarantee the same KPIs that regular research does. You might run into challenges when working in multiple time zones too, which larger agencies might find a nuisance.

CoSchedule also offers a handy automated re-post feature that picks your most liked or shared content and re-publishes it for you.

Save Drafts

Unscheduled drafts in CoSchedule go to the Workboard, which is a separate panel where you can store ideas for more content. You can drag and drop items from the calendar into the Workboard, and drag and drop Workboard items into the appropriate calendar day in the same fashion.

What’s better for agency marketers?

Both platforms function in a similar manner when scheduling content. However, they’re designed to serve different needs for different types of marketers: agency marketers and in-house marketers.

Both allow you to save drafts for later, drag and drop files, schedule posts in bulk, and gain colleague content approval.

The main differences are:

• CoSchedule offers templates to schedule social media posts.
• CoSchedule offers a few algorithm automations that offer users the ability to automate posts without thinking.
• HeyOrca provides marketers with more publishing security through approval roles.
• HeyOrca is designed for agency marketers who consistently need client approvals in order to publish content live.

At the end of the day, CoSchedule offers nice automation features, but CoSchedule users don’t have the same types of content approval permissions and features that HeyOrca users are privy to.

External content collaborations are much more challenging and require bulky actions just to get a simple yes or no (and why) from a client. CoSchedule hasn’t fully internalized the content scheduling, approvals, and automation process just yet. Then again, these types of features are not needed for marketers who work with external teams, freelancers, and clients.

It’s clear that CoSchedule is great for in-house marketing solutions. Once you involve multiple colleagues and external stakeholders (and not just one of them), HeyOrca takes the cake for content scheduling efficiency and workflow.

Storing Social Media and Content Assets

HeyOrca

Media and content libraries speed up workflow tremendously. You don’t need to constantly upload content; instead, it’s all there ready to be tapped. This is important when you want to leverage evergreen content or apply the same content to multiple social media networks.

Media libraries are convenient, but they can get messy if everyone is saving all assets to the same place, which is why HeyOrca offers separate media libraries for each client team.

This helps you keep media assets (gifs, images, videos, logos, etc.) organized and manageable without any mixups. You can also #tag all media assets to keep them organized based on campaign, keyword and more.

HeyOrca lets you schedule posts from the content library itself, so you can browse for interesting content in your library and act on what you find.

One of the most loved features that comes with our media library is the Text-Message to Library feature. Your team and your clients can send images from any mobile device directly to your media library. HeyOrca will organize them by time, date and hashtag for you. It’s easy to save images on the go, or during live events so your marketers can publish current content ASAP.

CoSchedule

Unfortunately, CoSchedule doesn’t have a media library (they only offer a draft library). Users will have to upload content each time they make a post, or save media assets in a post draft that they can reschedule. Either way, media must be kept in an organized fashion outside of the content management system.

What’s better for agency marketers?

Not much of a comparison here. Agencies have their own inventory of stock and custom content that gets used across different clients. An online media library is essential for smooth and responsive social media management. CoSchedule’s lack of this feature makes it difficult for them to answer this particular need.

Team Collaboration

HeyOrca

HeyOrca was built for large teams that function inside and outside the agency. It allows for both internal and external creative, editorial, and constructive collaboration. HeyOrca has considered the unique needs that clients and agency marketers have, and we have built them into our product.

HeyOrca allows you to control how many roles and responsibilities your colleagues have for publishing and editing content. We also help you control how much or how little collaboration your clients may have on your social calendar.

If you want your client to be able to reject, accept, edit, and write content on their calendars, then you can permit it. If you want them to only approve, reject, and comment on content, then you can limit their permissions as such.

Individual Post Approval

Each post has to go through a client approval cycle to guarantee brand compliance and message clarity. It’s extremely easy for your clients to approve or reject posts. All they have to do is follow a link and click a button. You don’t need to send them docs and spreadsheets, and ask for their approval. Worrying about them making accidental typos on your social content in a doc or spreadsheet will be a thing of the past.

Comments

Each post has an internal and external comments section. Your team members and your clients can @mention one another so that you can ask questions and get answers immediately. It’s very easy to collaborate with internal and external team members prior to publishing.

The best part is that external parties will never see internal comments in case someone on your team says something unsightly.

Audit Trails

The Audit Trail is an internal tool that you can use to track all changes that your team makes to a post. The client doesn’t need to know that their FB message was tweaked 40 times. They just need to see the final, perfect result! This helps your social media managers keep track of who did what to maintain agency transparency and avoid whodunits.

Event Strips

Event strips allow you to see special events and projects at a glance on any of your client calendars. They are typically used for internal collaboration, but can be shared with clients and can be used in very creative ways.

CoSchedule

Discussion Boards

CoSchedule helps you collaborate with internal team members through discussion boards, which are available on project tasks and individual social media posts. Specific team members can be mentioned using the @ prefix to draw their attention to important topics.

Sharing Read-only Views

CoSchedule lets you create flat, read-only views of calendars, projects and campaigns. These read-only views come in a variety of formats (including PDF), and you can customize their appearance to be client-friendly by uploading logos and adjusting the scope and depth of information being presented. External viewers can comment on these posts.

What’s better for agency marketers?

While CoSchedule’s publishable views are a good way to keep a client up to date, they don’t facilitate true collaboration between agency and client. CoSchedule’s strength is in internal collaboration, and that it does very well, but agency marketers need more. They also need an easier way to get the answers and updates they need from their clients to do their jobs well.

HeyOrca, on the other hand, leverages Post Approval, Discussion Boards, and publishable Event Strips to keep clients in the loop and engaged. This, in addition to internal accountability tools like the audit trail, truly helps agency marketers perform well and remain on the same page as their team members and their clients.

Approval Process

HeyOrca

Although we would like for clients to have absolute faith in their agencies’ abilities, clients should still be kept in the loop whenever content is being created/posted on their behalf. A proper approval cycle goes a long way towards building trust and preventing social media gaffes from taking place.

Such approval processes are best done through the HeyOrca calendar. Each individual post has different statuses, which can be changed to reflect its current situation. That situation could be awaiting approval, rejected or published. Each status is colour-coded for better visibility across the client calendar.

Approvals are also very easy for clients to handle. All you need to do is select the posts you need approval for, get the auto-generated link for them, and send it to your clients. All they have to do is follow the link and click to approve or reject the posts. It’s effortless!

CoSchedule

CoSchedule allows for approval processes as well. Approvals are kept for internal use only, and they are completed via assigned tasks, rather than having them on the social media posts themselves.

This feature helps facilitate control and accountability within your team throughout a campaign. It’s helpful for tricky or delicate tasks.

What’s better for agency marketers?

While CoSchedule’s task approval is very useful in marketing projects, it can’t be assigned to clients and employees. It’s just not the most ideal use case for an agency’s needs.

Agencies need to be agile and up to date. They need to be able to get posts approved quickly. Social media moves fast! Marketers need to respond to current events or catch a trending hashtag. HeyOrca’s in-calendar post approval works much better in this area than the task-based approval system. It works instantaneously so that your team can get the approvals they need and send content out the door.

Price Tag

CoSchedule

CoSchedule’s price scales by the number of users, social profiles and features available.

Growth:
The first tier is priced at $60/month. This plan only allows three users and 10 social media profiles. It allows you one calendar to work with and some basic email integration and analytics functions. CoSchedule could unlock the multiple calendars feature at this tier, but it would cost you $150/month to do so.

Professional:
The second tier is priced at $300/month. It gives you five users and 15 social media profiles. This isn’t that big of a jump for the cost. You gain access to features like multiple calendars, marketing workflows and monthly reporting. You also get a dedicated account manager at this tier.

Enterprise:
The highest tier is priced at $1,200/month. You get 10 users and 25 social profiles. Beyond the higher user count, the biggest benefits of this tier are the advanced team training, user roles and access logs.

HeyOrca

HeyOrca’s pricing offers teams more social media scheduling and posting flexibility than most products. We don’t charge agencies by users and social profiles. We offer a more fair and scalable pricing model based on how many clients your agency needs separate teams for.

Here’s our breakdown:

1-4 Clients:
This package costs $299/month. You get an unlimited number of users, social profiles, social posts, assets under storage, client approvals, and product training (with a dedicated customer success representative). However, you don’t get access to our text-message to media library function. Custom branding on your agency’s HeyOrca internal and external interface is not available.

5-8 Clients:
This package costs $349/month. You get an unlimited number of users, social profiles, social posts, assets under storage, client approvals and product training (with a dedicated customer success representative). You also get access to our text-message to media library function, and custom branding on your agency’s HeyOrca internal and external interface.

9-15 Clients:
This package costs $499/month. You get all the same features as the package for 5-8 clients.

16+ Clients:
This package pricing is customized. You get all the same features as the package for 5-8 clients.

What’s better for agency marketers?

CoSchedule’s pricing might work for companies who have a dedicated internal team, but may prove problematic for agencies.

A healthy agency with more than a handful of clients will have to pay a staggering amount of money just to manage multiple clients on a regular basis.

HeyOrca, on the other hand, is geared towards serving the needs of mid-sized agencies and offers pricing options to match. In-house marketing teams won’t feel left out because we offer unique pricing solutions for these situations as well.

Summary

Both platforms do an excellent job when it comes to creating and drafting social media posts, which is their bread and butter. They both have similar concepts in terms of projects, campaigns and event strips, which allow agencies to create and organize posts into different categories and themes.

Agencies and clients need to work together in order to be truly effective, and in that, HeyOrca holds most of the cards. Its range of internal and external collaboration features allow true coordination of effort between teams, and greater communication between all parties. CoSchedule’s internal collaborations are effective, but limit clients to read-only versions of works in progress.

Things diverge even more at the price points. CoSchedule limits the number of social media profiles an agency can own, which puts a hard cap on the number of clients they can service. HeyOrca, on the other hand, allows for an unlimited number of social profiles and even gives you as many calendars as you need to keep them all straight.

Marketing managers and agency executives who are looking to save their bottom line and grow their client base will find amazing value and use in HeyOrca’s platform. Our competitive and reasonable price-point undercuts social scheduling software that offer a limited scope of functions for what agencies need to operate and grow.

If you’re a marketing manager who’s looking to get a software that helps you save incredible amounts of time while scheduling and publishing social media content for your clients, and also help you manage your clients in an easier and more efficient way, then HeyOrca is a no-brainer! We’re every agency’s favourite Swiss Army Knife.