With new social media platforms constantly emerging, it can get hard to keep up with all of the content that needs to be produced, published, and analysed. As a result, businesses and social media managers are looking for ways to centralise their social media management to have a holistic view of their social media activities.
Our agency is no different.
As a social Media Specialist at Switch, I plan and publish daily social media content for various clients.
The one thing I don’t actually do is publish content on the daily.
Publishing content on various platforms is one of those tasks that does not need to take up an hour every day. With good planning, it can be minimised to two hours a month or less, depending on a client. However, that time could still be improved.
We’ve noticed that we spend quite a bit of time juggling the different social platforms. That’s why we’ve been looking for a tool that can integrate all of the key social media platforms in one place with all of the features provided by each of the native platforms. Even better, we want a tool that provides a decent ads manager, and a good performance dashboard. An all-in-one social media management solution – is it so much to ask?
In this article we’re taking a closer look at Loomly, one of the many social media management tools available on the market.
Contents
Pros
At a glance, Loomly offers some really great features, such as scheduling LinkedIn and Twitter content along with seven more social media channels. You can even add your own custom channels. The collaboration functionality allows you to communicate with your team and clients throughout the content approval process.
One of our favourite features, though, is content fine-tuning for each channel. Loomly allows you to schedule for multiple channels at once, which saves a lot of time, while still keeping the content customised for each platform. Think adding hashtags to captions for Twitter, changing image ratio for Instagram, and so on – actually works!
While all of the above is good, let’s move on to the bad and the ugly. Here are some of the things that make or break a social media management tool for us.
Spoiler: Loomly is not passing the test.
Cons
1. Loomly doesn’t support automatic posting of multi-image Instagram posts
It is not a secret that Instagram carousels encourage people to spend more time consuming your content. Unfortunately, Loomly only allows auto-posting of single-image posts. You can still plan your multi-slide posts, but you will have to go through the manual posting process yourself after receiving a reminder from the Loomly app, which is less than ideal if you’re looking to save time.
2. Loomly doesn’t support auto-posting of Instagram Stories
Even though this Instagram feature has grown in popularity, not a lot of management tools support auto-posting yet. If you don’t mind adding an additional tool to your social media management toolbox, we recommend checking out Storrito. Storrito supports the customisation of interactive elements, such as links, polls and quizzes, as well as bulk-scheduling of Instagram stories.
3. Loomly Ads Manager functionality is very basic
If you’re after a tool that incorporates your Facebook campaign management, in addition to content scheduling, Loomly is not it. Loomly’s Ads Manager is closer to the Facebook Boost Button functionality, mirroring the basic targeting options. However, if you run a small business or manage small business accounts, and your ads activity stops at promoting on-page posts, you might find Loomly to be sufficient.
4. Loomly Analytics functionality is very basic
The tool reveals an analytics dashboard for each channel after you schedule 5 or more posts. The data dashboard is quite basic, which is enough to monitor the overall performance of the account, however if you’d like to delve deeper you’ll have to depend on the data collected by each of the social media platforms, such as Instagram Insights and Facebook Ads Manager.
5. You Can’t Schedule PDF content on LinkedIn using Loomly
To be honest, this is not really a Loomly-specific issue. Scheduling PDF content is not yet available for LinkedIn, but it’s one of the functionalities we can’t wait to have in our toolbox. So come on, LinkedIn!
Even though Loomly didn’t quite meet our expectations, the search for the ultimate Social Media Management Tool doesn’t end here. Watch this space for our insights into Sprout Social and Falcon.io next.
