One of the main concerns any WordPress blogger has is how to be efficient with content marketing—you have to plan what to write, create the content, and promote it on social networks. Is there a tool that can help you with all this? Of course there is!
The essential tool to manage a blog is the editorial calendar. It helps you schedule, gives you an overview of the content you’re creating, and shows you at a glance what you’re posting and when you’re posting it. But which editorial calendar is best for your WordPress blog? As always, it depends on what your needs are.
Today we review the main features of two editorial calendars for WordPress, Edit Flow and Nelio Content, so you can easily identify which one is right for you.
#1 WordPress Plugins
Edit Flow and Nelio Content , unlike other products on the market, are two native WordPress plugins. Not being external tools integrated via iframes, they use the same WordPress permissions you’re used to. You don’t need to create new user accounts to access the information they offer you. And the managing of the editorial tasks is fully integrated into the same WordPress environment you’re already familiar with.
Edit Flow is available in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Japanese.
Nelio Content is available in English, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, French, Korean, Turkish, Malay, Romanian, Galician, and Basque.
#2 Drag-and-drop Calendar
Both plugins include an editorial calendar in which you can create, edit, move, and delete the post you are going to publish on your blog. With Edit Flow, you can indicate whether you also want the calendar to show pages. With Nelio Content, you have compatibility with pages and any other custom post type.
In the Edit Flow editorial calendar, for each planned post it shows you the title of the post and its status (Draft, Pending, or any other status you may have defined). You can filter posts by their statuses, categories, and/or users.
Edit Flow drag-and-drop Calendar (Source image: Edit Flow).The Nelio Content editorial calendar also shows you the planned posts and for each of them shows you its title and author. The status of the post is indicated by a color (red, yellow, or green) to indicate whether it’s a draft, has a pending review, or is already scheduled/published.
Nelio Content drag-and-drop editorial calendarNelio Content is a tool where, in addition to blog posts, you can schedule all the social messages you want to be published on social networks. And, to help you with all the content generation work, it also allows you to assign tasks to any member of your team.
For this reason, Nelio Content‘s editorial calendar shows not only the scheduled posts but also the messages to be published on social networks and the tasks that should be completed before the specified date.
You can filter the display of social messages by social network.Nelio Content also includes several filtering options, so that you can indicate whether you want all posts, messages, and tasks to be displayed on the calendar or just some of these items. You can filter posts by category. You can also filter social messages by network or social profile. And you can filter tasks by the person in charge.
In Nelio Content, when you reschedule a post, all the related messages and tasks are automatically rescheduled to the new date as well. That is, if a post is postponed by one week, all related items from that post are also postponed one week.
And finally, you can export the Nelio Content calendar to Google Calendar and other tools.
Nelio Content
I’m so happy about Nelio Content that I will sound like a payed advocate… but here’s why you’ll love it: it works as promised, its auto-scheduling feature is top-notch, Nelio’s value for money is unmatched, and the support team feels like your own.
Panozk
#3 Ideas that will Become Posts
A situation that often happens to all of us is that you come up with an idea that you want to write about and you want to write it down somewhere to turn it into a post of your blog in the future. You can write this idea down in any tool or in WordPress itself as a draft post. And by the time you’re planning your calendar posts, you’ll need to have it on hand. How are these ideas displayed on the calendar?
With Edit Flow you can only display those posts that already have a date assigned to them. Therefore, you will need to have your ideas written down elsewhere.
Nelio Content, on the other hand, allows you to have “unscheduled” ideas, and these are available at all times for you to schedule them on the calendar when it suits you best. The list of ideas or unscheduled drafts is always available on the right side of the calendar, unless you hide it ?
Listen carefully to your users and you might hear some awesome ideas. Here you have an example: our editorial calendar now includes a section of unscheduled posts, just as one of our customers suggested. Cool!I’d like to note that the implementation of this feature was due to the fact that several Nelio Content customers requested it. And we know they’re thrilled with it ?.
#4 Editorial Comments
Edit Flow and Nelio Content allow you to create editorial comments on posts. This can be very useful when you need to share some information with those involved with a certain post or you simply want to keep some information handy.
Editorial comments in Edit Flow (source image: Edit Flow).
Editorial Comments in Nelio Content. Discuss anything about a post with your authors and editors without leaving the edit page.The two tools work similarly in terms of this functionality.
#5 Notifications
You’ve finished writing a post and want a colleague of yours to review it. You have the option to send them an email or, much easier, change the status of the post to Pending review. If you use the latter, you’ll be happy to know that both tools can automatically notify the users you have previously indicated about the status change.
Edit Flow allows you to create user groups. For example, the group of photographers, authors, reviewers, etc. And then, for each post, you can indicate to which user or group of users you want notifications to be sent.
In Edit Flow you can specify the users or groups of users to whom you want to send notifications when the status of a post changes.In Nelio Content, you can also select the users to whom you want notifications to be sent when there is a change in the status of a post. But it doesn’t include user group management.
Nelio Content notification metabox, where you can add users interested in receiving notifications about a specific post.#6 Keeping Track of the Progress
In addition to the features I mentioned earlier, Edit Flow also includes a metabox to track and share some additional metadata. For instance, you can indicate when the first draft should be ready or whether an image is still to be included:
Editorial metadata metabos in Edit Flow.In the case of Nelio Content you have the option to assign tasks to your teammates and see at all times how good you’re doing and if there are any tasks that are past their due date:
Editorial Tasks. With Nelio Content, you’ll be able to assign tasks to people in your team and set their due date. Keep track of all the important work and never again miss anything!Moreover, to better control whether a post is ready for publication, Nelio Content informs you at all times of the quality of a post:
Post Quality Analysis. Nelio Content analyzes the quality of your post in a non-disruptive manner.This is extremely useful, as it helps you make sure you don’t forget anything before publishing a post.
Additional features
So far I’ve compared the features that in one way or another are common to both tools. But there are certain areas in which both tools differ. Let’s take a look into those.
Edit Flow has a Story Budget. This is a screen where you can quickly view the progress and status of your most recent posts:
Edit Flow Story BudgetNelio Content, on the other hand, has several automations and shortcuts that help you improve your productivity for writing and promoting your posts.
Quickly Include Images and GIFs
Nelio Content allows you to insert images and Gifs from Unsplash, Giphy, and Pixabay directly from the WordPress image selector with a beautifully-integrated interface:
Search and select the giphy you want to add to your post and that’s it.Automatic Promotion on Social Media
The automation of the promotion of your posts on your social network is a very useful feature for your content marketing. You’ll find this feature in the Premium version of Nelio Content.
Nelio Content with Social Automations automatically creates all the social messages you need to promote a post. Click on the button and let it do the hard work for you.After writing a post, a single click will tell Nelio Content to take care of scheduling your entire promotion on social media. In other words, it automatically creates the queue of messages to be published in each of your social profiles without you having to worry about anything else.
In addition, the promotion of new content is complemented by the sharing of old content from your blog. Thus, the editorial calendar is automatically filled with social messages that will give a second life to your best old posts.
Nelio Content with Social Automations will fill all your social profiles for you with older content if there’s nothing new to share. This way, you’ll maximize your chances of driving traffic to your website. Here’s a look of the Editorial Calendar.Analytics the Matter
Nelio Content includes some basic analysis onr how your content is working:
Social Media analytics with Nelio Content show you which posts have received the most visits and with a click on Add Message you can quickly create a new message to promote that post again on social networks.Conclusion
An editorial calendar is probably the best tool to make sure you write content often and consistently, so don’t even think about having a blog without an editorial calendar! If you’re only interested in having an editorial calendar, both Edit Flow and Nelio Content will help you (although Nelio Content has a fresher user interface ?). But if you want to be much more efficient in your process of creating and promoting your blog content, Nelio Content is the tool you’re looking for.
Featured image by rawpixel.com in Unsplash
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