Ordinal

We use Ordinal to schedule content across all major platforms: LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok, and Threads. While cross-platform scheduling is something that all social media scheduling tools do, Ordinal's flow has been the most simple (and enjoyable) to use. There is literally no learning curve.

You pick your platforms, drop in your content, and go. You also can tailor the caption for each platform easily.

They even thought through little things, like showing you the LinkedIn cutoff line while you're writing your caption. That's the point where the "see more" kicks in and your hook either works or doesn't. Knowing exactly where that line falls while you're drafting changes how you write.

With other social media management tools, we experienced errors and bugs when posting our short form video content. For example, errors saying our video file size is too big, or the platforms failing to post (we've experienced this with both Metricool and Buffer).

But in the 6 months we've been using Ordinal, there hasn't been any errors or friction. There was only one time the platform notified me there was a problem posting (and in the end, the piece of content ended up posting as expected). That said, Ordinal is the most reliable social media scheduling platform we've used.

What I'd want to see improved: post templates for repeatable formats!

We schedule a lot of short podcast clips and every time I go to schedule something, it feels like I'm starting from scratch.

It would be nice to save a template with the same first comment, same auto-likes, same four platforms, same accounts every single time. Better yet, if AI was built into the platform and suggested some comments based on past one's we've written on behalf of our team members, that'd be amazing.

We gave this feedback to the Ordinal team a while back, and they said they are working on it, so maybe we'll see this pop up soon 👀

You can schedule likes, comments, and re-posts ahead of time by connecting your team accounts to Ordinal (team members can opt-in for engagement-only access).

Ordinal gives you the option to engage immediately, or stagger comments throughout different times to even make it look more realistic. Auto-engagements only work on LinkedIn and X (well, currently auto-comments on X are not available but that's due to X limiting the function in their API). On Instagram, you can leave a first comment but only from the account you're posting from.

Before Ordinal, I'd post and then have to ping Alex (my co-founder) to go engage with it. Then, he'd have to stop what he was doing, go to the post, read it or watch it, and formulate a reply. We're just way too busy for that to be a recurring thing. So when we learned that we could do all of this with Ordinal, it just made it a no-brainer to switch to.

It's also helped me disconnect a lot more about the performance of "each post" as I don't need to be online monitoring.

What is interesting is I've had posts do well on LinkedIn that I wouldn't even expect, and then once I see it gaining traction I may put some more fuel on the fire (e.g. re-post from our personal accounts).

It's the closest thing to having an engagement pod without the pain of actually being in one (we all hate them and we know it).

I wanted to expand on the above slightly.

Ordinal supports two types of connected social profiles: scheduling profiles and engagement-only profiles.

Scheduling profiles can publish content, use auto-engagements, and track analytics, so you would use those for accounts you actually post from, like the brand account or CEO's account.

Engagement-only profiles are used just for auto-engagement, meaning likes, comments, and reposts. So other team members can connect their LinkedIn or X accounts without giving full posting access, while still helping boost posts automatically when they go live.

Earned Media Value (EMV) is what you would have paid in ad spend to generate the equivalent impressions. It's become a standard metric because marketers needed a way to justify organic and influencer content spend to stakeholders who were used to thinking in ad dollars.

The logic is if this post generated X impressions organically, what would it have cost us to buy those same impressions through paid media? It gives you a dollar figure that finance and leadership can understand. It gained traction in 2015-2018 when influencer marketing was exploding and brands needed a way to compare "we paid this person $10K for this post" against "we spent $10K on Meta ads."

The con is a post can have high EMV and drive zero sales, and zero leads. It tells you what something was worth in hypothetical ad spend, not what it actually did for your business.

For B2B startups where LinkedIn is more about presence and trust-building than direct response, EMV is actually a perfect metric. If Zapier posts on LinkedIn, they aren't expecting the post to close new accounts. But they are expecting it to build presence, and EMV gives their team a way to make the investment in content more tangible.

With that, Ordinal gives you an estimated EMV per post automatically. When comparing Buffer vs Ordinal or Metricool vs Ordinal, other platforms do not give you this metric, so we were missing all of this context until we switched over.

We had a website launch post that Ordinal flagged as generating around $500 in EMV on X alone. It's just been super helpful to see a value tied to social content.

Ordinal allows you to create Approval flows if you want someone on your team to peek at content before it goes live. I use this all the time when I am drafting posts from Alex's account (CEO). It sends him an email with a deadline, and the post won't public unless he approves it.

If you want multiple people to approve it, you can set that up too with varying due dates for each person. It's slightly less strict than other tools we've tried (e.g. Sprout) where you can have dependent approvals (so if you are the final approver, you wouldn't even see content until it had been internally reviewed and approved by all parties).

That said, being a smaller team we typically just need one approval at most so for us this hasn't been an issue.

Ordinal gives you reporting to get a health-check of how your content is performing. They track follower count, engagement, and EMV. It's everything I need to see what's been working and flopping.

If you're used to Hootsuite or Sprout Social, they have deeper reporting (e.g. down to your LinkedIn follower demographics) so that's something to be aware of, especially if you're coming from a corporate company and are used to reporting in a certain way.

But for start-ups and small teams, we think the reporting Ordinal gives is more than enough to give us a pulse check on performance across all platforms.

When a post goes live, Ordinal sends a notification to a connected Slack channel. Anyone on the team can see it, click through, and add a further boost if they want (think of this more for the team member's accounts that you don't have connected in Ordinal).