Why you still bounce between screens with a social media scheduler

How many screens do you pass through to get one piece onto three channels?

It is not that the features are missing. Some tools give you a separate place to collect ideas, and plenty of them will adapt a post to suit each channel. And yet, when you actually sit down to work, you keep moving between screens.

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Having the features together is not the same as having the workflow joined

Even when the features live in one product, if the steps are not joined you end up carrying the data yourself. You copy an idea out of the library and paste it into the drafting screen, move the result over to the channel editor, and when that is done you go to the scheduling screen. Inside a single app you are still switching screens and tabs.

Every switch breaks the workflow along with it.

• The context fades. Which idea this came from, and why you took this angle, stays behind on the previous screen. Editing the per-channel versions, you end up reopening the earlier screen to check what you meant.
• It gets unclear which version is final. Editing each channel separately produces several versions. When you change the original, whether the others need the same change is something you have to keep track of yourself.

The trouble is that this difference never shows up in a feature table. Whether there is an idea library, whether per-channel editing exists, is written on the product page. Whether a person has to walk across the gap between those two steps is written nowhere. In the end you have to measure it yourself.

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How to measure the tool you use today

Do this once, the next time you publish. An ordinary post works better for this than one you are putting extra care into.

Four things to count.

1. Screen switches. How many times you changed tab or page.
2. Copy and paste. How many times you moved text from one screen to another.
3. How many times you typed the same thing twice or more. Retyping the same link or the same tag for each channel counts here.
4. How many times you went back to check something. Count only the times you went back to look at something again.

Two rules while you measure:

• Do not change your usual way of working while you measure. If you tidy up the order to do better, you are measuring your resolve that day rather than the tool.
• Count from the moment you pick a source to the moment you finish scheduling the last channel. You can leave out logging in and thinking up what to write. The tool is not involved there.

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How to read the numbers

• If number two, copy and paste, is not zero, those two screens are not connected. That holds even when both features are offered. Having to copy means the next screen cannot properly receive what the previous one produced, and a person is filling that gap.
• A high number four, going back to check, means the context does not stay on screen. If you went back to check the original, the original should have been sitting next to the version you were editing.
• Add all four and divide by the number of channels. That quotient is what gets added every time you add one more channel. If you are considering a fourth channel, it is worth knowing this number before you add it.

A feature table tells you none of these four. A tool that ships with an idea library can still produce five copy operations, and a tool that looks light on features can come out at zero.

At Tintio we chose the flow that drives number two, copy and paste, to zero. Pick a source and its content goes straight into the draft as material, edit the draft and the per-channel versions follow immediately, and the scheduling screen carries through what is going out.