#New — Enjoy longer replies on Twitter

Back in September, Twitter was announcing some updates to how characters were accounted for against the 140-character limit: yesterday, Twitter built upon this and announced a brand-new feature allowing you to enjoy longer replies.

Long story short: now, @usernames no longer count towards your 140 characters.

In greater details:

@usernames you are replying to will no longer appear in the text of your tweets.

Instead, @usernames will be displayed above the tweet itself, preceded by the mention “Replying to”.

At any moment, you can click on this “Replying to” mention to see who you are actually replying to, and if necessary, remove or add people from your reply.

Our team is already working on reflecting these changes in Loomly, with an update scheduled for early next week.

Loomly is a visual social media planner that lets you preview your tweets before you hit publish: start your 15-day free trial now.

#Tip — Reward Your Community With An Amazon Giveaway

Reward Your Community With An Amazon Giveaway Organizing a giveaway is (almost) always a great idea to engage and reward your community, and one of the easiest ways to handle this may be to use Amazon Giveaway.

Why? Because Amazon Giveaway makes things incredibly easy and smooth:

Select a prize from bazillion items eligible at Amazon.com.

Setup the details of your giveaway: number of prizes, giveaway type — sweepstakes, random instant win, lucky number win, “first-come, first-serve” — and rule for winning (probability).

Receive the link of your giveaway instantly over email and share it on social media.

And that’s it: Amazon will take care of the rest, sending prizes for you to your lucky followers-winners!

Amazon Giveaway how it works

What’s in it for Social Media Managers: with Amazon Giveaway, there is no need to setup anything on the technical side and there is no cost beyond the price of the prize. It just does not get easier than that!

Loomly is a visual social media calendar that helps you create better content for your community: start your 15-day free trial now.

#LongRead — Get A Grasp Of How Governments Leverage Social Media Globally

In some ways, social media are “just” tools and are neither good nor bad (nor ugly) in and of themselves: their impact simply depends on how humans decide to use them — at least until AI takes over.

With that in mind, it’s pretty interesting to take a look at how governments leverage social media around the world.

In this amazing series, The Conversation does a great job at explaining how governments from all sides of the globe rely on social media to exercise power:

US president Donald Trump, who gets on Twitter the moment he wakes up, may be social media’s most prominent politician user, but he is hardly the only one. For the past two decades, world leaders have leveraged the power of the internet to communicate with the public. In some nations, digital tools are part of an effort to increase government transparency and accountability. In others, they are a platform for propaganda, censorship and fake news.

Credit: The Conversation

It’s almost impossible not to learn something about how governments leverage social media around the world from each of the five articles featured in this global series:

What’s in it for Social Media Managers: although you may not deal with politics directly on your own (brand’s) social accounts, understanding how your tools of trade influence this very topic around the world puts things into perspective.

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

Calendy Update Publish Posts With Multiple Images

#Loomly — Update: Publish Posts With Multiple Images

Today is Black Forest Cake Day… and if you already enjoy Loomly as much as you like, let’s say, chocolate cake, this could very well be the cherry on your (Black Forest) cake: your favorite social media calendar now offers support for posts with multiple images.

You can create posts with multiple images for Facebook and Twitter and publish them automatically if you use Loomly’s native scheduling features.

You can also create posts with multiple images for Instagram, although, as you know, you will need to publish these posts manually.

Since Day 1, we have been tremendously lucky to be guided in the development of Loomly by your constructive feedback: this new feature is a perfect illustration of this approach.

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you so much for being the best users we can dream of.

The Loomly Team.

Loomly is a visual social media calendar that lets you preview your posts before your publish them: start your 15-day free trial now.

Averate Time Spent In A Lifetime On Social Media

#Data — Average Time Spent In A Lifetime On Social Media

What is the average time spent in a lifetime on social media?

The short answer is: less than watching TV, but more than eating & drinking, grooming, socializing and doing laundry!

Credit: Mediakix

The longer answer is, according to this study by influencer marketing agency Mediakix, 5 years and 4 months, split this way:

Credit: Mediakix

You can check the results of this Mediakix study in great details here.

What’s in it for Social Media Managers: as people spend more time consuming social media than actually feeding themselves, it is clear that this activity has become an essential part of their life. And as such, it is key to offer them more than promotional content in disguise, and rather actual stories, experiences and fun through high quality posts.

Loomly is a social media calendar that helps you create better content: start your 15-day free trial now.

#Fun — Take Part In Worldwide InstaMeet 15

This week-end — March 25 & 26 — it’s Worldwide Instameet 15 and the theme is Kindness!

What is Worldwide Instameet you ask?

It’s a celebration taking place via Instagram and inviting users from all around the world to express themselves, sharing their stories and spreading ideas around a theme.

As a member of the global Instagram community, you can join the event in (one of) two ways:

Online through the platform with this hashtag: #WWIM15❤️

“Offline”, either by joining an existing Instameet, or by organizing your very own

At Loomly, we have to say that we LOVE this concept: one, because it’s a beautiful thing for a social network to actually bring people together, and two, because there is no such thing as too much kindness and we should enjoy each and every opportunity to give and get some.

What’s in it for Social Media Managers: a great opportunity to engage and federate your audience around a positive theme and spread some kindness around your brand.

Loomly is a visual social media calendar that helps you create better posts for Instagram: start your 15-day free trial now.

#New — Discover LinkedIn Trending Storylines

Yesterday, LinkedIn introduced LinkedIn Trending Storylines.

In appearance, this looks pretty similar to Facebook Trends & Twitter Trends: trending topics organized around hashtags.

When we take a deeper look, it’s actually much more: LinkedIn Trending Storylines regroup content from LinkedIn Pulse as well as third-party platforms, and either from influencers, industry experts or connections from your network.

Curation of content is personalized for each user, thanks to a combination of human work — 24 in-house editors — and algorithms — mainly machine learning technology — that makesure every LinkedIn trending feed gets populated with relevant content clusters.

This approach also aims at offering balanced news from different perspective, while avoiding political views and #fakenews.

Last but not least, LinkedIn Trending Storylines foster serendipity with hashtags and topic buttons, making it incredibly easy to either dive deeper into a specific subject by exploring new angles, or discover related stories.

This new feature has already started rolling out in English in the US and will be available in more countries and language soon.

When activated, you can find LinkedIn Trending Storylines on the top right hand side of your homepage on desktop:

Credit: LinkedIn

And under the Trending tab on your mobile homescreen:

Credit: LinkedIn

What’s in it for Social Media Managers: by leveraging the power of hashtags associated with a storyline, you can jump in a conversation, share your perspective and surf on the spread of news cluster to gain free impressions and engagement, “while supplies last.”

Loomly is a visual social media calendar solution that helps you create better content for LinkedIn: start your 15-day free trial now.

#Book — Learn How To Make A Hit With Hit Makers

How do you make a hit — i.e. a product that people like — and what separates commercial failures from successful, similar products?

These are the two main questions answered by senior editor at The Atlantic magazine Derek Thompson, in his recent book Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction:

This is a book about hits, the few products and ideas that achieve extraordinary popularity and commercial success in pop culture and media.

In Hit Makers, you will learn about:

Why people like what they like (hint: it has to do with basic human needs).

The role of social media in spreading ideas.

The economics of cultural markets and the common patterns between hits overtime and over the globe.

Most notably, the author shares stories and insights from success stories of all kinds, from Pokémon Go to the Mona Lisa, Fifty Shades of Grey & Taylor Swift.

Truly fascinating.

What’s in it for Social Media Managers: while you may not be in charge of creating actual products (in the sense of engineering new items for your brand’s catalog), understanding what resonates with (your) audiences is probably the most powerful tool at your disposal to engage with them.

Loomly is a social media calendar solution that helps you create better content for your audience: start your 15-day free trial now.

#Data — Age Range Of Users Most Influenced By Instagram Ads

As Instagram keeps growing and becomes more and more mainstream, with a broadly diversified audience, it’s interesting for Social Media Managers to understand which users are most influenced by Instagram Ads.

According to a recent study from influencer marketing tool Influence.co, as reported by Adweek:

Credit: Influence.co x Adweek

While digital native generations such as millennials and Generation Z account for the largest number of Instagram users, older users are becoming equally at home on the platform […]. In fact, the group most likely to search out products after seeing Instagram promoted posts is those aged 65 through 74, followed by those aged 45 through 54.

This finding is all the more telling for marketers whose target audience include working seniors and members of the Silver Economy, revealing Instagram as a potentially surprising yet effective awareness & acquisition channel.

Loomly is a social media calendar tool that lets you preview your Instagram posts before you publish them on the platform: start your 15-day free trial now.

#Fun — Watch Cat Gifs All Day Long With Cat Gif TV

Sometimes, we stumble upon something so great, that we need to drop everything and play with it.

Today is one of these days, as we’ve just found an app that combines two of the things we love the most: cats and Gifs!

The team at Swarm NYC created Cat Gif TV, a very simple app that lets you watch animated Gifs of cats all day long.

There are only two ways to use this app (on mobile): swipe left to see the next cat gif and swipe right to see the previous one.

Dead simple and highly addictive.

Cat Gif TV is available for free on iOS & Apple TV.

What’s in it for Social Media Managers (and everyone else): just fun and a great way to start the week, which is actually quite a lot when you think about it.

Loomly is a social media calendar tool that helps you please your audience even when you don’t share cat photos or videos: start your 15-day free trial now.