#Update — Publish Posts Instantly With Your New Instant Publishing Feature

Yes, Loomly is a social media scheduler that lets you plan your content in advance.

But sometimes, just sometimes, you need to publish a post right away, and scheduling it for 5 minutes in the future may not be the most convenient hack.

Enters your brand-new instant publishing feature, which simply publishes any unpublished post immediately for you on all your connected (and selected) social media accounts and marks it as published.

Note: when you “publish now” a post one multiple social media including Instagram, the state of your post will transition to scheduled until your mark your Instagram post as published, and will then automatically update to published.

Available from your List View, Post Builder and every Post View, either by marking a post as published or by actually taking the action of publishing a post instantly, this feature will particularly reveal useful when:

You forgot to publish a post and need to fix things quickly.

A post you had scheduled failed publishing and you want to publish it ASAP.

You need to duplicate posts from one calendar to another on the fly and are in a hurry to get them all published within a short window.

As always, this feature was inspired by your enlightening & encouraging feedback and we could not thank you enough.

We have many updates coming your way in the following weeks and can’t wait to share them with you all.

Have a fantastic end of your week,

The Loomly Team.

Loomly is a social media calendar tool that lets you schedule your posts in advance — and now publish them instantly: start your 15-day free trial here.

#Update — Calendy Is Becoming Loomly

TLDR: Calendy is becoming Loomly & everything remains the same for you!

Love is all you need

You may not know this story, but Calendy was actually born out of love.

Back in May 2015, our Co-Founder Thibaud was looking for a solution to make his business & life partner Noémie’s job easier.

As a Social Media Manager, Noémie had to prepare dozens of editorial calendars for her clients every single month, and like most of us in the industry, was battling with spreadsheets & emails to get things done.

Noémie & Thibaud therefore started to build a simple tool, for their own use, that would do just one thing: simplify the process of social media content approval.

At this time, the platform was not even offering native scheduling features!

In any case, surprisingly enthusiastic feedback from their existing clients encouraged the pair to soft launch the platform in public beta in February 2016.

Long story short

Flash forward to today: more than 15,000 users — from individuals, to influencers, agencies & brands — have joined us in this journey, helping our growing team improve Calendy thanks to their immensely valuable feedback, through many updates.

Along the way, we realized what made our platform truly unique: its ability to assist you, our beloved users, to create better content for your audience.

Just like a loom assists textile producers to weave cloth & tapestry.

This is the reason why, this week, Calendy is becoming Loomly.

Your favorite social media planning solution will start moving today, and until Friday, from www.calendy.co to www.loomly.com.

What you need to know

Besides this slight domain name update, nothing changes for you:

Your user account & trial / subscription will still be active.

Your calendars will keep working the exact same way.

Your posts will get published as usual.

If you happen to get logged out in the process, simply log back in with your existing credentials.

Of course, if you have any question, please feel free to reach out to us at contact@loomly.com: while our name is changing, our desire to help remains intact.

We hope you will enjoy this new name as much as we do, and we can’t wait to share with you many exciting surprises in the next few weeks.

Thank you so much for everything,

The Loomly Team.

Loomly is a visual social media planner that helps you create better posts for your audience: start your free trial here.

#Tool — Animate Static Photos In Seconds With Plotagraph

When it comes to photo effect & enhancement, some apps add filters while other apps generate short videos from photos: now, Plotagraph lets you animate static photos.

For instance, you can turn this static photo:

Into this animated photo:

Click here if you cannot see this video

Here is how Plotagraph works:

Upload a photo from your library or take one directly from the app.

Add animation vectors where you want the image to get animated.

Add a mask where you want your photo to remain static.

Press “Play” and voilà!

Plotagraph is available for $4.99 on iTunes, both for iOS & MacOs — and an Android version is in the works.

What’s in it for Social Media Managers: a chance to create a different kind of visuals your fans may not be used to yet, therefore generating even more engagement from your content.

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

#Tip — Customize Facebook Link Previews With Pretty Links (And With Caution)

Earlier this week, we were telling you about the latest Facebook Link Preview update, which now prevents you from editing metadata in your posts, and we have disabled this feature in Loomly as well.

All over the web, social media managers have been expressing their frustration with this Facebook update — although in fairness many also understand what’s at stake here — which led to new developments.

Facebook since announced Link Ownership, a new, interesting & official feature allowing major publishers to customize metadata in link previews for URLs from their own domain.

In parallel, developer Michael Kramers came up with Pretty Links, a free, simple online tool that lets you customize Link Previews for Facebook posts:

How does it work? According to Pretty Links’ website:

Very simple – Pretty Links acts as middleman between your webpage and the Facebook crawler. While it delivers your preferred sharing preview to Facebook, it redirects all other traffic to the webpage (technically, it’s a 301 Permament Redirect, for those concerned with SEO).

A word of caution: while we do believe Pretty Links is an interesting hack from a technical point of view, it remains nonetheless a hack, working around a new official Facebook policy, which may not be compliant with Facebook’s current / upcoming terms of services. Therefore, we cannot endorse Pretty Links and we highly recommend prudence when sharing customized link previews to Facebook.

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

#Tool — Launch An Instagram Contest With Tagwin

If you’ve already run an Instagram contest, you know it’s a powerful strategy to get new followers, engage with your existing audience and even drive revenue.

You also know how challenging the logistics of such a marketing event can get, as you need to save all contestants details into a spreadsheet and use a random number generator to determine a winner.

Enters Tagwin, a dedicated online service with a friendly interface that makes organizing an Instagram contest a breeze:

Authenticate with the Instagram API.

Select an entry mechanics: post to a hashtag, follow your account, comment on a post, like a post.

Choose a winner selection method: random draw or judging.

Launch your contest.

Tagwin is powered by Strutta, an established online platform speciliazing in web contest & sweepstakes management.

Tagwin is currently offering a special launch promotion allowing you to launch your first Instagram contest for free: then the platform comes with a monthly fee determined by your number of followers, starting at $19 per month.

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

#Data — Emoji Trends On Facebook & Messenger

Yesterday, to celebrate World Emoji Day (that’s a Post Idea in Loomly), Facebook shared a great infographic about emoji trends on Facebook & Messenger, including:

The top 10 most used emojis on Facebook & Messenger.

Countries that use emojis most on Facebook & Messenger.

The number of emojis used daily on each platform: 60 million on Facebook & 5 billion on Messenger!

Credit: Facebook

It actually feels pretty good to know that “rolling on the floor laughing” is the most used emoji in the world on Messenger: after all, a good laugh heals a lot of hurts.

Loomly is a social media planner that let you create better posts for Facebook — and include emojis in your posts: start your 15-day free trial now.

#New — Learn About The Upcoming Facebook Link Preview Update

Starting July 18 (tomorrow), a Facebook link preview update will enforce a new rule preventing customization of link metadata included in Facebook posts.

What does it mean, exactly?

This means it will no longer be possible to edit the meta title, description & image associated with a link in a Facebook post.

Posts including custom metadata will automatically revert back to the original metadata associated with the shared URL when published on Facebook.

For instance, if you share Loomly’s homepage and edit your link preview as follows:

Your post will automatically revert back to:

Which posts will get impacted by this change?

This Facebook link preview update will impact:

All new posts published starting tomorrow.

All posts scheduled before tomorrow for a date later than tomorrow (including tomorrow).

However, posts that have already been published won’t be retro-actively affected by this change.

Why is Facebook implementing this Facebook link preview update?

As Matthew Robertson explains on the official Facebook for Developers blog:

By removing the ability to customize link metadata (i.e. headline, description, image) from all link sharing entry points on Facebook, we are eliminating a channel that has been abused to post false news.

While potentially surprising and not particularly practical for most of us who rely on editing link preview metadata to control how our posts appear on Facebook, this is a step in the direction of slowing down — if not stopping — the spread of false / deceiving information, or as we all like to call it: fake news.

This update is consistent with Facebook’s broader effort to stop the spread of misinformation, as we’ve seen it in the past, here and there.

As a community of high-quality, value-added, true content creators, there is no doubt we will benefit from this update on the long run.

What to do about this change?

Although we won’t be able to customize how link previews appear on Facebook when publishing posts to Facebook anymore, there are actually three things we can do:

Take a step back and understand why this is happening and what’s in it for us in the long term (see above).

Keep in mind that we can still optimize how our own links — i.e. links to content pieces we publish on our platforms, such as blogs & websites — appear on Facebook, using Open Graph meta tags.

Wait for Facebook’s upcoming solutions to the new challenges introduced by this update:

We’re working to find other solutions that allow publishers to share customized content on our platform, and we will have more to share in the coming weeks. […] Our goal is to support publisher workflows and app functionality, while limiting malicious misrepresentations of underlying link content. As content customization evolves we continue to work closely with our partners to support the best tools for sharing links on Facebook.

We hope our explanation of this Facebook link preview update makes sense and clarifies things as much possible.

As always, feel free to reach out to us at contact@loomly.com, should you have any question or suggestion about this — or anything else.

Thank you for everything,

The Loomly Team.

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

#Fun — Play Fake News, A Game Of Facts & Falsehoods

Let’s end the week on a fun note, and celebrate both Bastille Day and POTUS being in France for the occasion, with a fun game to play called Fake News.

The concept is simple: you are presented with a series of news headlines and you must determine which ones are actual news and which ones are fake news before you run out of time.

And, as the game’s website reminds you:

They are all real headlines. They are just not all true.

Cherry on the cake, the arcade-inspired, retro design of both the website and the game itself is just plainly awesome!

Fake News is available for free on the App Store.

Have fun & happy Bastille Day you all!

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

#LongRead — Observe How Facebook Is Challenging YouTube

As we’ve seen earlier this week, beyond Facebook — and Facebook’s other apps such as Messenger & WhatsApp — only YouTube has more than one billion monthly users: this may be the reason why Facebook is challenging YouTube on the video area, chasing online stars.

In this New York Times piece, Daisuke Wakabayashi gives us a backstage access to Facebook’s strategy to win over online video audiences, and consequently, the online video advertising market.

Reading this article, you will learn:

How Facebook is partnering with their own rising stars while poaching some YouTube’s celebrities.

Why some creators switch over to Facebook while other remain loyal to YouTube.

What YouTube is doing to keep up with Facebook’s offensive.

In the end, it seems YouTube may be challenging Facebook as much as Facebook is challenging YouTube, which could lead to interesting improvements on both ends.

What’s in it for Social Media Manager: an interesting insight about the forces at play when it comes to online videos and a preview of what a platform war could look like on this front.

Loomly is a visual social media planner that supports video posts for Facebook: start your 15-day free trial now.

#Resource — Learn Everything About Colors With Canva

If you follow this blog, you know we love learning and we love perfect color combinations: Canva’s latest design wiki, which teaches everything about colors, is a dream come true!

Just pick a color and you will not only get color combination suggestions, but the meaning of this color, “how it’s made” and ideas of others colors to use match it with depending on the effect you are want to achieve.

For instance, if you pick Midnight Blue as a color, here is what you will learn:

Cherry on the cake, once you’ve found a color — and a color combination — you really like, Canva lets you browse templates and start creating a document right away.

What’s in it for Social Media Manager: an efficient way to reinforce your messages with visual communication, enhancing your visuals with meaningful color combinations.

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