Edgar: Social Media Scheduling Made Easy [Review]

As a social media manager, I’m always on the hunt for tools that will make my job easier. There are so many tools out there, but I’ve never become so reliant on one until now. Meet Edgar, the social media scheduling tool that will save you heaps of time and make good use of all your content, thoughts and memes.

What Is It

Official version: “Edgar is a social media scheduling tool like no other. Instead of publishing your updates just once and throwing them away like yesterday’s rubbish, he carefully catalogues them in a limitless library that you build over time.”

Edgar allows you to create categories for your social media updates (such as blog posts, promotion etc.) and then lets you create a schedule for these updates. However, instead of scheduling specific updates for specific times, you schedule the categories. It’ll then pick a post from that category to post at your chosen time. Once it’s gone through all the posts in category it’ll just cycle through them again, and if you add a new post it will  push that to the front of your content queue.

However, Edgar does offer other scheduling options that come in handy from time to time. If you do want to post something just once there’s a handy Use Once category, and there’s also the option to schedule an update to post at a specific time (and then keep it in the category to be used again down the line).

Edgar allows you to connect to Twitter, Facebook (profiles, pages and groups) and LinkedIn (profiles and companies).

What I Use It For

I use Edgar for all of the accounts I own and all of the accounts I manage. I’ve got a category for my blog posts and promotional posts to post on my account, a category bursting with funny pictures to post on several accounts, client updates to post on their accounts and all of Eat More Cake’s articles (even the ones that are a year old) as evergreen content should be promoted forever.

Why I Like It

Edgar saves me so much time. Before using Edgar I used Hootsuite to schedule all my social updates each week. It was a long and tedious process and I often didn’t bother/forgot to promote older content. With Edgar, once you’ve uploaded your social media posts and created your schedule, all you have to do is add new content when you have it.

Oh, and it supports emojis too!

What I’d Like To See

Expiry dates on posts

When I’m promoting things such as events, I’d love to be able to automatically get the tweet to stop going out after the event has passed instead of having to manually remember to delete the post

The ability to choose which posts use bitly

Sometimes, like when I’ve scheduled posts with a pic.twitter.com link to an image I’ve tweeted before instead of manually uploading the photo, I don’t want the links to become billy links as it stops the image displaying. However, when I’m adding a blog post to my Edgar library, I do want the link to shorten. Right now I’m solving this issue by disconnecting bitly and manually shortening links outside of Edgar, but this is tedious and time consuming. A small check box to indicate whether you want links in a particular post to shorten using bitly would be a life saver!

Drag and drop image upload

I save pictures everywhere. On my desktop, in dropbox, in my downloads. I have no idea where most of them are stored. When uploading an image to Edgar you’re required to locate the file, however if I could just drag it from the downloads bar in Chrome to Edgar it’d save me so much time. That’s one part about scheduling with Hootsuite that I do miss.

A mobile app

@AyshBanaysh That's a thing that could happen! (In the meantime, though, he's mobile-friendly! Like, REALLY friendly. They're pretty tight.)

— MeetEdgar (@MeetEdgar) September 2, 2015

Edgar is a super mobile-friendly chap and you can totally upload posts from your phone, however what I’d like is to be able to go through my photo library and send a picture straight to Edgar (like you can with Twitter, email, imessage etc.) as I have so many albums of funny pictures that never get used because they’re on my phone and not my mac (I know I can sync them onto it, but I’d still like this feature).

Image grab in the plugin

The Edgar plugin is a great tool and I tend to use it for sharing other people’s articles. While everyone seems to LOVE Twitter cards, I prefer sharing articles with an image attached. If Edgar automatically pulled the featured image from an article and attached it to the post (letting you check it first), I’d use the plugin a lot more. Right now I end up opening it, closing it to save the image and then opening it again to add the post. It’s tedious. I know I’m asking for a lot with this one, but hey a girl can dream.

Final Thoughts

Edgar is definitely my favourite social tool (no, I haven’t been paid to say that). I do still have a Hootsuite Pro account, but I only really use that for the analytics and occasionally to look at streams these days. Edgar does offer statistics, but they’re not as in-depth as I need them to be. At $49 dollars a month (10 social accounts, 1000 posts) it definitely felt a little on the pricey side at first, but it saves me so much time it’s worth it. I’m probably going to have to upgrade to their premium plan soon as I keep having to disconnect social accounts to stay below the limit of 10. I wish there was a way to only upgrade how many accounts I connect as I don’t really need more space in my library (the next plan is $99 a month for 25 social accounts and 5k posts).

I’d recommend Edgar to anyone who has a tone of content but doesn’t have time to schedule it every week. They do a 14 day free trial too, so there’s no reason not to at least try it! Not only has Edgar saved me time, but it’s also significantly increased my blog traffic. And, aside from adding new posts when I need to, I don’t have to do a thing!

Want to know more? Check out Edgar’s website– I definitely recommend watching the video.

@AyshBanaysh @MeetEdgar