As Social Media Managers, don’t we try to win friends and influence people on a daily basis?

About 90 percent of everything shared online is now visual—selfies, GIFs, smartphone videos, and more.

Although drawing pictures is the oldest language in the world, visual communication has never been more ubiquitous, and therefore crucial.

In Draw to Win: A Crash Course on How to Lead, Sell, and Innovate With Your Visual Mind, best-selling author Dan Roam teaches the basic concepts of visual thinking.

In particular, you will learn:

• Why you should draw

• How to draw

• What to draw to sale, lead, innovate, train — or just figure things out

Visual thinking comes in very handy for us Social Media Managers to tell stories online and inspire people.

The best part of it all? You don’t even need to be good at drawing to convey ideas efficiently in a visual manner.

Draw To Win is available here on Amazon.

Happy reading 😉

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

The best way to market a brand is through storytelling.

And the best way to learn how to tell stories is to read The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Volger.

This book unveils the common pattern guiding powerful storytelling: the hero rising in the face of challenges.

Just like Hercules, Luke Skywalker and Francis Underwood.

Of course, this book finds applications in many fields outside of Hollywood — where it hold the title of unofficial Bible for movie executives, screenwriters, playwrights — including in politics and marketing.

After all, as a Social Media Manager, who is the hero of the stories you tell online, if not your brand?

The Writers Journey is available here on Amazon.

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

If you like all things viral, you have probably come across Sarah Cooper’s famous infographic 10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings, including some of these hilarious illustrations:

You already know how to explain Snapchat to your clients / boss: but what about actually using Snapchat for business?

This is exactly the topic of Oh Snap! You Can Use Snapchat For Business, a nice little ebook by Kate Talbot.

Of course, as a Social Media Manager, you are probably fluent in emoji.

Loomly Toolkit frequently features ideas and articles about how social media shape brands.

Once in a while, we also like to take a look at how social media shape society.

Today is one of these days, as we are interested in how social media are transforming the lives of teenagers: in particular, American girls.

In her enlightening — sometimes scary — book American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, Nancy Jo Sales takes us on her journey through ten states, talking to girls aged 13-19.

Browsing these 416 pages, you will learn how Instagram, Whisper, Yik Yak, Vine, YouTube, Kik and Tinder influence the youngest female millennials on so many aspects of their life: interests, self-esteem, ambition, sex and social skills, just to name a few.

Whether you want to better understand the American girls around you as a person, or would like to get deeper insights on this particular demographic as a marketing professional, this book is definitely a must read.

Happy reading 😉

Loomly is a visual social media calendar tool, which helps you stage your content as a team before publishing it online: start your 15-day free trial now.

One of the challenges of freelancing is to deal with administrative tasks, in particular finances and accounting.

No worries, FreeAgent has you covered with their very nice ebook A field guide to freelancer finances.

After Contagious, New York Times best seller author Jonah Berger comes back with another fascinating book that we can all benefit from as Social Media Managers: Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior.

If you read this blog, you must have some kind of interest into social media 😉

If, on top of that, you also happen to like comic books, then you are going to love what’s next…

… 140 Characters is the first volume of Unfollow, a new comic book series with a social media theme!