#LongRead — Zoom On The Impact Of Social Media On Democracy

In the past, social media have both been seen as an unprecedented opportunity and a lethal threat for Democracy.

This week in our Long Reads section, we are featuring the best piece of journalism we have read so far on that very topic: the impact of social media on Democracy.

Extracted from the print version of The Economist from November 4, this article titled Once considered a boon to democracy, social media have started to look like its nemesis actually makes a point before it even begins, with a sarcastic cover image and a punchy baseline:

Credit: The Economist

In this (very) long read, you will learn about:

How social media have influenced politics in Ukraine, America, France, Iran, Germany, Philipines.
What we are all paying with in the era of the Attention Economy (hint: our eyeballs).
Proposals contributing to make social media a loyal ally of Democracy in the future.

What’s in it for Social Media Managers: an interesting take on what is happening on the field from a macro perspective and a reminder of our major role in the game a professionals who use social media every single day.

Loomly is a social media planner that helps your team contribute to making social media a better place: start your 15-day free trial now.

#Tip — Create Animated Emoji GIFs With Demoji

What’s the only thing better than Emojis & animated GIFs? Animated emoji GIFs!

What exactly are animated emoji GIFs? It’s simple: multiple emojis combined into one animated GIF.

And it’s even simpler to use:

Type a couple of emojis.
Demji automatically combines these emojis into an animated GIF for you.
Share the result wherever you want.

Although the primary purpose of Demoji may be to send augmented emojis to your friends in private conversations and group chats, this can also prove very useful on social media, in at least two different ways:

As comments, to respond to your audience and react in a creative manner.
As content, to engage your audience with fun & surprising posts (as you know, you can publish animated GIFs with Loomly)

Demoji is available for free on iOS & Android.

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

#Data — Percentage Of Snapchat Audience Exclusivity

Let’s kick off this week just like we ended the previous one, with social media usage data: today, we are focusing on the percentage of Snapchat audience exclusivity.

That’s the proportion of Snapchatters who are exclusive to the Snapchat platform on a given day, in comparison to those who use Snapchat and also use another platform.

Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, commissioned App Annie to analyze audiences on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and — of course — Snapchat, which revealed that:

48% of our daily audience in the US can’t be found on Instagram on any given day. As for Facebook and Twitter, 40% and 80% of our daily audience (respectively) can’t be found on those platforms.

Here are these results, segmented by country (USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia & Australia), in the form of a very nice GIF:

Credit: Snapchat.com

You can learn more about this study, both on Snapchat’s blog and App Annie’s blog Insights sections.

Timing is interesting, as these numbers, which can potentially trigger a fair dose of FOMO amongst advertisers, get announced at the same time as Snapchat is rolling out its new sponsored stories & “hands-on” AR ads.

What these numbers do not show however, is the size (absolute numbers) and percentage (relative numbers) of the broad Facebook ecosystem’s audience exclusivity, i.e. how many users are exclusive to the Facebook / Messenger / Instagram on a given day, in comparison to those who use one of these platform and and also use Snapchat: hint, it must be significantly higher than the numbers above.

What’s in it for Social Media Managers: a very clear incentive to give Snapchat’s new ads a go, while keeping in mind that Snapchat remains a smaller platform than competition.

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

#Data — October 2017 Social Media Usage Index

According to Verto Analytics‘s October 2017 social media usage index, Facebook is still very clearly dominating the industry, with three of its platforms — namely Facebook, Instagram & Facebook Messenger — in the the Top 4 of the most used social networks:

In particular, it’s interesting to note that:

Facebook is not only killing the game when it comes to monthly active users (almost 200 millions), monthly reach (93%), stickiness (70%) and sessions per month per user (173)…
… social network users also spend more time on Facebook (18:24!) every month than on Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat & Tumblr all together!
Instagram is a very strong second player on most metrics, including monthly active users (144 millions), monthly reach (67%) and smartphone users (more than 96 millions).
Twitter is still a very large player on the field, most definitely when it comes to monthly active users (110 millions) and reach (52%), the platform underperforms in terms of stickiness (34%) and time spent per month per user (2:00).
While Snapchat remains five times smaller than Facebook in terms of monthly unique users (more than 43 millions), the Venice-based app ranks second for stickiness (47%), time spent per month per user (4:00) and sessions per month per user (144), which emphasizes the addictive aspect of the service.

What’s in it for Social Media Managers: a clear signal that investing time, energy and money on Facebook as an ecosystem (including Facebook, Instagram & Messenger) is a safe bet given how neatly the blue giant dominates the market.

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

#Resource — Enjoy Office Music & Focus At Work With Studiowave

Of course, you can boost productivity with streamlined processes and performant collaborative tools… you can also get more focused and achieve more by setting the right atmosphere at work, for instance with great office music.

That’s the promise of Studiowave: a free vibe machine for offices, studios and all of us who need focus at work.

The interface is super simple and allows you to mix nice instrumental beats with inspirational speeches, by setting a volume level for each element, and come up with the perfect office music for you.

Two quick little tips:

- Make sure you keep Shazam handy, as you will probably want to save many tracks from this 24/7 radio for later.
- Don’t start playing with their interactive logo, it’s a bit too addictive…

What’s in it for Social Media Manager: a nice way to get in a killer mood and enter the “flow” to prepare your social media calendars (with Loomly).

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

#Video — Learn How Facebook News Feed Works

If you want to learn how Facebook News Feed works, then the best way is probably to watch this video by Facebook themselves:

If the video does not appear in your browser, click here to watch it on Facebook.

This video is to be watched in parallel with these News Feed publishers guidelines:

Publisher Principle 1: People on Facebook Value Content That’s Meaningful and Informative
Publisher Principle 2: People on Facebook Value Accurate, Authentic Content
Publisher Principle 3: People on Facebook Value Standards for Safe, Respectful Behavior

All three Publisher Principles are consistent and resonate with previous, related articles we published on Loomly Toolkit on this very topic, about the latest Facebook News Feed formula, how Facebook fights low quality links in News Feed and, even, this other video already explaining how Facebook News Feed works.

What’s in it for Social Media Manager: a confirmation of what we already all know, i.e. that (good) content is king.

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

#eBook — Leverage These eCommerce Growth Tactics For Your Brand

If your brand sells anything online, and you want to boost your sales efficiently and sustainably, then look no further than the eCommerce growth tactics introduced in Let The Ca$h Flow.

The folks from Viral Loops & Contact Pigeon teamed up to create this very nice 39-page free eBook, focusing on the 3 corner stones of eCommerce growth (or any business for that matter):

Acquisition: how to generate traffic to your store.

Conversion: how to convert traffic into sales.

Retention: how to trigger repeat business from existing customers.

The eCommerce growth tactics presented in Let The Ca$h Flow are based on implementation and optimization of content marketing campaigns, signup forms, marketing automation processes, CRO efforts & referral programs: all good stuff!

Recommendations in this eBook are backed by data and illustrated with examples, respectively for more reliability & accuracy.

Download Let The Ca$h Flow for free here.

What’s in it for Social Media Managers: an efficient way to integrate social media efforts into a broader business strategy, for maximum impact on growth.

Loomly is a social media planning solution that helps you optimize your presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ & LinkedIn: start your 15-day free trial now.

#Update — Publish Tweets With 280 Characters & YouTube Twitter Cards

On Tuesday, Twitter officially rolled out the 280-character limit to all users: as of today, you can publish tweets with 280 characters via Loomly as well.

Besides this increased character limit, your post creation process remains exactly the same in Post Builder:

If you want to publish a post to multiple channels, including Twitter, define generic content first.

Fine-tune your content for each channel, making sure that your Twitter copy is 280-character long (or less).

Links & media respectively count as 23 characters and 0 characters against this limit.

As announced yesterday, you can include images up to 5MB and videos up to 200MB and 5 minutes in your tweets.

One little thing we have improved along the way is post preview for tweets including a YouTube video, which now show up in Loomly (and, of course, get published to Twitter) with a video Twitter card:

That’s it for today — a quick update letting you publish 280-character tweets and the ability to include YouTube Twitter Cards in your posts — until we bring something much bigger to you in the upcoming weeks: stay tuned!

As always, thank you so much for your support: you are the best users we could dream of.

The Loomly Team.

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

#Update — Upload Larger Media Assets To Your Posts

Loomly now allows you to upload larger media assets to your posts from Post Builder:

Up to 10MB for photos on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ & LinkedIn — and 5MB on Twitter.

Up to 200MB and 5 minutes for videos (although we do recommend videos less than 30MB and shorter than 2 minutes for an optimal experience).

This update is already available to all Loomly users: login and create a new post now.

Along with faster upload and GIF to MP4 conversion, the increased limits above are in fact the tip of the iceberg…

We have been working on a brand-new architecture, which is the foundation for two two very nice new media-related features, coming by the end of the year.

We can’t wait to share these exciting updates with you: stay tuned!

As always, thank you so much for your incredible feedback and your continuous help: it’s an honor for our team to get up every morning and build Loomly for such an amazing community of users.

You are truly the best.

The Loomly Team.

Loomly is a social media content management system that lets you plan, create and publish content to your accounts: start your 15-day free trial now.

#Data — The Biggest Annoyance Of Social Media Professionals’ Job

According to research by 4C, 36% of social media professionals report that switching between platforms to manage execution of social media campaigns is the biggest annoyance of their job (source: Econsultancy).

Credit: 4C / Econsultancy

To be even more specific:

Media agency professionals are wasting the equivalent of two days per week (17 hours) performing admin, instead of focusing on creative and strategic tasks.

63% said they believe the amount of time spent working on social campaigns will only increase over the next few years.

This is something Loomly has been trying to solve from Day 1, allowing you to publish to six channels — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ & LinkedIn — from one platform.

In addition, we are working on upcoming features that will let you handle more channels, more content formats and even some form of media, right from your Loomly calendars: stay tuned!

Loomly is a visual social media calendar solution that helps you create, publish & measure success of social media content: start your 15-day free trial here.