#Tool — Make Engaging, Clickable Images With Linklay

Linklay helps your audience go faster from picture to purchase — literally, to checkout — by helping you create beautiful clickable images.

Clickable photos are perfect for you if your brand sells products online, as well as if your are content creator & blogger, particularly if you publish tutorials, guides, lookbooks, roundups and lifestyle images.

Creating clickable images is as easy as 1, 2, 3 with Linklay:

Upload an image.
Add click-points to that image, including product details (name, price & URL).
Copy & paste the code generated by Linklay to your website and voilà!

All clickable images created with Linklay are responsive, Google compliant, unbranded & Pinterest-friendly.

Linklay is available through a subscription, starting at $7 per month.

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

#Fun — Create Hilarious, Custom Merch With Bitmoji Swag

Let’s end this week with a good dose of fun, with Bitmoji Swag, an online service allowing you to custom print your Bitmoji on cool pieces of merch.

The process is dead simple:

Choose a product you like: stickers, mug, t-shirt, hoodie, socks, and many more.

Decide how many of these little treasures you want to order.

Add bitmoji_swag on Snapchat & provide your Snapchat username so that the team at Bitmoji Swag can grab your Bitmoji from your Snapchat account.

Checkout!

If you want to get a good laugh, take a look at this hilarious video by Bitmoji Swag’s creators Khallil & Salima in which they explain why and how they created the service…

… including some priceless catch phrase such as “You can make underwear with your Mom’s face on it.”

Want to create some custom merch with Bitmoji Swag? It’s this way.

Enjoy your weekend!

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

#Update — Publish Animated GIFs to Facebook & Instagram

Sometimes, a seemingly small feature can make a surprisingly big difference… that’s the kind of update we tend to think we are announcing today: Loomly now allows you to publish animated GIFs to Facebook & Instagram.

So far, you were able to upload animated GIF files to Loomly but these were not accepted by the Facebook (Page) & Instagram APIs: you could either publish these “as is” and they would end up as non-animated on your social accounts, or upload MP4 files instead, specifically for these two platforms, which also implied some kind of manual conversion on your end.

Now, Loomly will do the heavy lifting for you: just upload an animated GIF to Post Builder and, if you selected either Facebook or Instagram as channels for your post, then your file will automatically get converted to MP4, and get published as a video.

Note: on all other channels, namely Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ & LinkedIn, your original animated GIF file will get published as expected.

Then, you may ask: what about the famous 3-second minimum duration for videos on Instagram?

Well, if the MP4 video resulting from the conversion of your animated GIF is shorter than that threshold, then Loomly will automatically loop it for you until the 3-second requirement is met.

In other words: you can now focus on finding awesome animated GIFs your audience will love, and Loomly will take care of the rest for you.

As always, this is a feature inspired by your feedback: thank you so much for your amazing support and your incredible enthusiasm.

(A lot) more is coming: stay tuned!

The Loomly Team.

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

#Resource — Build An Innovative Resume With Torre Bio

Besides science, to build an innovative resume, you basically have three options:

The social option, with networks such as LinkedIn, Viadeo & Xing.

The hosted option, with platforms such as DoYouBuzz & About.me.

The good ol’ option, with tools such as Word, Photoshop & Acrobat.

There is now a new option: the Graph Database option, with Torre Bio.

In other words, welcome to the era of the data-based, API-connected, innovative resume.

The process is pretty straightforward:

Build your bio (you can even upload your LinkedIn resume in PDF).

Showcase what matters to you.

Connect your profile to other apps and start getting recommendations, finding remote job opportunities and identifying talents.

What’s in it for Social Media Managers: an opportunity to leverage an emerging platform to standout from the crowd with an innovative resume.

Loomly is a visual social media calendar for professionals & passionate individuals alike: start your 15-day free trial now.

#Tip — Read & Share The Best Medium Stories With Top Medium Stories

If you love Medium but sometimes feel overwhelmed by the quantity of content available out there, then Top Medium Stories is exactly what you need: a list of the best Medium stories — understand: the most popular — updated daily.

What’s in it for Social Media Managers:

An efficient way to keep an eye on trends and what (a part of) the Internet is talking about.

Inspiration for articles to share on your social accounts.

A nice place to focus your effort of Comment Marketing.

Top Medium Stories is available online for free.

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

#Resource — Hack PR Like An Expert

As a Social Media Manager, PR may or may not be part of your responsibilities: in any case, you will certainly enjoy these three resources that help hack PR like an expert:

Upbeat helps you find journalists you should follow on social media.

Presskit is easiest way to create a hosted press kit where journalists can find everything they need to write about you.

Jona is a DIY kit to get press coverage (PR Guide + Strategy Help + Journalist Database + Templates + Access to Community), mainly for startups.

Of course, no resource can completely replace the experience & network of a PR expert, but that’s a good start to hack PR when you can’t afford one (yet): enjoy!

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

#Tip — Leverage RSS Feeds For Inspiration In Loomly

Recently, we launched new Post Ideas features allowing you to leverage RSS Feeds for inspiration in Loomly: here are three ways to take advantage of this update!

Note: if you are wondering what RSS feeds are, here is everything you need to know on that subject.

Share your own blog posts

If you own and maintain a blog — be it on WordPress, Squarespace, Medium, Blogger or any other platform — and need to distribute your articles through social media, then Loomly has you covered.

With the Assistive RSS Feeds setting, when you connect a feed to a calendar, all entries from this feed are automatically converted into Draft posts in that calendar.

The entry title becomes the post subject and gets included, along the entry URL, in the post copy, pulling metadata for you.

All you got to do is review your post in Post Builder, fine-tune it if necessary, and schedule it — or publish it instantly!

Monitor your online presence with Google Alerts

Google Alerts lets you get notified every time a pre-defined keyword gets crawled by one of the search engine’s robots (in other words: every time a keywords appears on a new web page).

This is useful if you want to monitor your brand’s name online, for instance “Loomly”, or if you are interested on watching industry-specific keywords, such as “social media calendar”.

You can receive these Google Alerts over email… or via an RSS feed.

And then, you can connect this RSS feed to a calendar in Loomly and, thanks to the RSS Post Ideas setting, every new entry from that feed will be suggested to you as a Post Idea in Post Builder and on your Dashboard.

This makes it incredibly easy to share articles mentioning your brand or even republish social media posts mentioning your account.

Get inspired by third-party publications

Last but not least, if you enjoy following specific publications in your domain, for instance social media blogs, you can grab their RSS feed URL and connect them to your Loomly calendar, here again with the RSS Post Ideas setting, and use what these outlets publish as inspiration for your own posts.

For instance, if you see that multiple blogs & media publish articles about the same topic in your vertical, it may be interesting to harness the power of that conversation by creating and publishing a post on your own social media accounts about that same topic.

We hope you will enjoy these RSS Feed features as much as we do and create awesome content for your audience.

That’s all for today, folks!

Loomly is a simple social media calendar offering you Post Ideas right when you create new content, so you never suffer the writer’s block ever again: start your 15-day free trial now.

#LongReads — Make Creative Use Of Social Media

Let’s start the week on the right foot with two inspiring long reads including ideas to make creative use of social media:

On Medium, Tristan Ferne, in charge of R&D on the web for the BBC, suggests 12 new digital story formats to standout online:

On TechCrunch, Devin Coldewey reports how Sociologist Emilio Zagheni at the University of Washington found a creative way of misusing Facebook’s Ads Manager tool to as a valuable supplement to census data.

What’s in it for Social Media Managers: inspiration to keep moving forward and making creative use of the tools & platforms we work on every day.

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

#Loomly — Enjoy Three New Features: URL Shortener, Mobile Post Builder & Post Labels

Today, we are introducing not one, not two, but three new features in Loomly… and something tells us you should enjoy these new features! Read on.

Loom.ly URL Shortener

Until now, if you wanted to include a nicely formatted link in a post, you had to use a third-party tool to shorten it and then paste it in Loomly: these days are over! Post Builder now provides you with a built-in URL shortener that converts any link you input into a beautiful, short loom.ly link.

Mobile Post Builder

The Loomly mobile apps (iOS & Android), launched last month, are already getting their own significant update: Mobile Post Builder now allows you to create & edit posts on the go, from your smartphone. It’s the Loomly experience you all know and like — including Post Ideas, Generic + Fine-Tuning Content & Post Optimization — right in the palm of your hand.

Important Note: make sure to download the latest version of Loomly from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store to get access to Mobile Post Builder.

Post Labels

Last but not least, a simple yet super useful feature inspired by you: Post Labels let you tag posts in Post Builder and identify at a glance throughout Loomly what campaign or category they belong to. For instance, you can create labels for specific campaigns or types of posts, such as blog posts, sponsored posts, product posts, etc. Of course, you can also filter posts by labels in the List View & Calendar View.

Oh, and we have two pretty major updates coming up in the next few weeks: the version 2.0 of an existing feature, and a surprise, brand-new feature we have been cooking for a while now that will take your Loomly experience to a new level. Stay tuned!

As always, a big thank you to all of you for your amazing feedback and your incredible enthusiasm: we are grateful every single day to be able to build Loomly for you.

The Loomly Team.

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