#Tool — Source Interesting Stories Before They Become Hot With GONG

The promise of helping us source interesting stories has been made — and broken — more times than we can recall in the past, by apps we all know.

Nevertheless, a new, innovative tool is offering an interesting approach to this problem: GONG.

As CEO Itzik Ben-Bassat told TechCrunch:

(We) at Gong (are) combining (…) two approaches, looking at how stories spread across social media and combining that with the behavior of individual readers, creating what it calls the HackRank algorithm. The goal is to predict which story will be interesting to you, even before it’s become a huge story on other sites.

In addition to a basis live keyword search, GONG also offer an email alert option, which delivers stories over email on a daily basis.

Along our favorite RSS readers and monitoring tools, GONG could become a valuable third-leg in our curation tool belt, helping identify interesting stories before they are hot, hence contributing to positioning our brand / business as a pioneer and a thought leader.

Happy curation 😉

Loomly is a visual social media planner: start your 15-day free trial now.

#Tip — Display Posts At The Top Of Your Facebook Page

As mentioned earlier, Facebook is rolling out new Pages layouts and in some cases, because of this update, “you” no longer display posts at the top of your Page, but instead your videos and photos will show up first:

#Resource — Learn How Journalists Use Social Media

Following up on their How Journalists Use Social Media in 2016 infographic, Cision published the fifth Social Journalism Study as as a white paper, which tracks the ways social media affects journalists and media professionals.

#Tool — Turn Any URL Into An Emoji Link

??.ws is a simple website that lets you turn any URL into an Emoji link (and you know you can use Unicode Emojis in Loomly).

#Fun — Have Some Thanksgiving Fun With Turkey Fling

To all our American readers, we wish a very happy and peaceful Thanksgiving.

To all our readers outside of the USA, we wish a wonderful Thursday.

#LongRead — Discover How Social Media Reinforce Confirmation Bias

Politics, religion, lifestyle, OS, pets and even things as silly as a jam brand: we all have our own opinions, beliefs and preferences.

And that’s perfectly fine, as this is what makes us who we are.

#Data — Facebook Usage & Engagement In 2016

According to Pew Research Center, who has been conducting studies about how Americans use social media over the past decade, Facebook usage and engagement are on the rise in 2016:

79% of internet users (68% of all U.S. adults) use Facebook. Roughly eight-in-ten online Americans (79%) now use Facebook, a 7-percentage-point increase from a survey conducted at a similar point in 2015.

In order to better understand the big picture, and why the above figures are impressive, here is the top 5 most used social media in the US in 2016:

Credit: Pew Research Center

It’s also interesting to take a look at the frequency of use of these social media sites, in particular the percentage of users who visit these platforms daily, weekly and less often:

Credit: Pew Research Center

From all the numbers above, one thing is pretty clear: Facebook usage and engagement are not only increasing in 2016, they also show how far ahead of the competition Mark Zuckerberg’s platform remains.

We highly encourage you to take a deeper look at the fascinating study from which all the data of this article were extracted from.

Loomly is a visual social media planner for teams: start your 15-day free trial now.

#Tip — Create Facebook Messenger Ads

Yes: you can now create Facebook Messenger ads which offer an unprecedented reengagement opportunity for brands and businesses.

#Loomly — Add Unicode Emojis To Your Posts

Did you know? You can include emojis in your posts in Loomly.

As long as they are unicode emojis, they are fully supported on the platform and will make their way up to your favorite social networks.

Learn About Facebook Metrics & Reporting Update

#New — Learn About Facebook’s Metrics & Reporting Update

In an effort to improve audience and ads measurement, Facebook announced yesterday a significant metrics & reporting update, to offer “more clarity and confidence about the insights [they] provide.”