Meet Edgar

I have a new best friend, and he’s an octopus with glasses (#hipster). Actually he’s the most powerful social media tool I’ve ever come across. Meet Edgar.

I found out about Edgar through a blogging friend, and I immediately visited the site for more information. To get right to the point, Edgar is a social media scheduling tool with one vital functionality that other schedulers lack.

He saves your content.

I know, #mindblown. I have long since embraced the joy of auto-posting to social media, as I just don’t have time to do it all manually. I do actually have a family to pay attention to, a part-time job outside of blogging, a few hobbies, and that dang laundry won’t learn to do itself (Edgar, could you help me with THAT??).

So I use a plugin that auto-shares my blog posts to my social media networks at the time of publication, but I have had a hard time getting into a routine of regularly sharing anything other than my latest posts and the occasional Instagram photo on my networks. Part of the reason I have a hard time wanting to spend much time on social media updates is because they are never ending! You have to continually schedule updates to keep content going out to your followers. Until now.

Edgar is ingenious. He saves and recycles your status updates so that you only have to schedule them one time ever. And on top of that, the app is super user-friendly and a joy to use. It does take some time to set up, initially, especially if you have lots of content already, but it’s worth it. Let’s look at some screenshots.

Meet Edgar: a Social Media Scheduler that recycles your updates!

After connecting your social media accounts, the three most important sections in Edgar are your Categories, Library, and Schedule.

Categories

First you set your different categories. These would be the different kinds of updates you might post on social media, and Edgar starts you off with some suggestions. You might have categories for your recipe blog posts, questions to ask your followers, inspirational photos, and funny quotes, for example. Here are the categories I have set up so far (still a work in progress):

I want to post inspirational fitness photos every morning on my Facebook page, so I created a category for that. I also want to regularly promote older content, so I have a category for my blog posts (which I will probably eventually break down into several different categories- for fitness, travel, etc). I also want to share my affiliate links for Bluehost and StudioPress, among others, so I have a category for that. Your categories will be specific to your needs, but just think about what types of things you like to post on Facebook and Twitter.

Library

Once you have some categories set, the next step is to get some content into your library. Categories work like folders for your status updates, and your library is where you add in the actual updates that you want to post. You can add new content to your library from any screen within Edgar, by clicking the blue button in the top right that says “Add New Content.”

Select the proper category from the drop down box, assign the update to one or more of your social media accounts (I like to do Facebook and Twitter separately, employing hashtags on my Twitter updates and writing longer updates for Facebook), and then just type in your content, include a link if necesssary, add a photo if you’d like, and boom, you’re done. I love that when you click “Save Content” your update is saved, and the page refreshes, all ready for another status update! That has been helpful as I’ve been spending chunks of time uploading content all at once.

Schedule

The magic happens with the schedule. Once you have your categories set up, and they have content in the form of status updates, then you are ready to set your schedule. Edgar has a simple-to-use scheduling tool that allows you to choose the days and times you would like your different categories to post, and to which networks.

As you can see, I’m still in the process of setting up my schedule. You’ll notice that I only have one blog post scheduled to be promoted per week, per account, and that is because I have just started to insert content into that category. So far I have uploaded 10 different status updates that promote old blog posts. With the once per week schedule, those 10 posts will rotate and not repeat for 10 weeks. The more content I add into that category, the more timeslots I will add into my schedule for that category, because the updates will repeat less often.

When you post is up to you, but I strongly suggest taking a look at your insights and analytics to find out when your followers are online and viewing your content. That will go a long way in helping you decide when to share what.

Edgar’s individual plan is $49 per month, which is the plan that would be right for most bloggers. I have to admit, I cringed at the price at first, because I’m selective about monthly expenses, but then I quickly realized that this is an incredibly valuable tool and appropriately priced (though I’m hoping they will start an affiliate program!).

I am still working on getting all of my content into Edgar, but once I do the initial setup, I will just be adding in status updates for newer “evergreen” posts as I write them. I am very excited to start adding to my Edgar schedule and to see how my traffic and earnings are affected. I will definitely report back to let you know how it goes!

What do you think- is Edgar as cool as I believe he is?