Social media scheduling tools are highly beneficial as they help us to manage Ballyhoo communications, in addition to managing our clients’ social media platforms – crucial for building and maintaining customer relationships and helping to increase brand awareness. We’ve been using Loomly for three years now, and thought we’d share our honest thoughts on the platform.
Firstly, Why Use A Social Scheduling Tool?
Social media is an invaluable tool that allows your business to reach customers, build connections and gain valuable market insights. Managing your social media accounts can be time consuming, but scheduling platforms help with this – they allow you to manage multiple platforms in one place. For an agency like Ballyhoo, it also allows us to manage multiple client accounts simultaneously.
Loomly Scheduling Tool
Loomly is a social media management platform that allows users to create, schedule and manage social media content from one place, collaborating with a team or clients to generate traffic to your business. We initially chose Loomly due to its integrations with all significant social media platforms and the ability to assign posts to content approval states. Below, we discuss why we have continued to use Loomly for three years, in addition to some bugbears that we would love to see addressed in the future.
Why We Love Loomly
Manage in One Place
Using a social scheduling tool such as Loomly allows us to have one account and one login to manage all of our clients’ social accounts. We have individual ‘calendars’ set up – a calendar is effectively a client – and from there we have each individual social platform. This means that we can easily and effectively flick between clients/calendars to dedicate a specific block of time to review, approve, and schedule content across multiple platforms for several clients without having to log out or switch interfaces. This streamlined process is essential for managing a high volume of content with consistent quality, and the unified calendar view provides a comprehensive, at-a-glance oversight of all scheduled posts, helping us to identify content gaps.
Post Approval Workflows
Our content creation process, whether for Ballyhoo communications or client work, includes a mandatory proofing and approval stage by another member of the Ballyhoo team. Loomly facilitates this by allowing us to add social posts to the platform and then ‘submit for approval’. A team member can then review the post preview exactly as it will appear on the social platform, to check for errors or provide suggestions. Following this review, posts can be edited based on feedback or scheduled for publication.
This process ensures that mistakes are not overlooked, provides the benefit of a second perspective, and streamlines our workflow.
Bulk Posting
One of the advantages of Loomly is cross-platform posting, which allows us to craft a single, high-quality post, complete with text, images, videos, and appropriate calls to action, and then post that content to multiple connected social media platforms all at once. It then provides us with the opportunity to tailor the post for each platform’s unique requirements. For example, we can choose Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, input a generic post, and then edit the Instagram post to not include a link but instead a relevant call to action, along with an image of the correct dimensions needed for Instagram posts.
Integrating with Leading Social Platforms
A key advantage of Loomly is its integration with all major social media platforms. This is crucial for our clients who utilise a diverse mix of channels. For Ballyhoo, the ability to schedule posts to Google My Business is particularly vital, a feature that is surprisingly absent in some competing scheduling tools.
Two-Factor Authentication
Loomly offers Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) for all plans, allowing us to keep our accounts secure – paramount when managing client accounts to protect them from unauthorised access and potential breaches.
Inbox and Social Listening
One of Loomly’s key features is a unified inbox, which captures Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn comments, direct messages and mentions in a single view. This allows us to manage engagement with our clients’ social media accounts, ensuring that they stay connected with their audience and customers. This is important for brand awareness and reputation. Additionally, Loomly offers a handy feature of saved replies – allowing us to quickly respond to commonly asked questions with pre-written responses.
Sustainable Social Growth
Posting to social media is purposeless if the results are not being analysed. Luckily, Loomly offers analytics for Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, allowing us to see post metrics in one place. This allows us to keep track of how posts are performing, allowing us to make informed decisions for content going forward – whether that be making improvements or using well-performing content as inspiration for future posts.
Additionally, Loomly offers the option to export analytics as PDF or CSV files.
Scheduling Platforms Compared
As with all tools that we use at Ballyhoo, we continuously monitor alternative options to see if they are better suited to our needs. In our latest annual review, we found that Loomly continued to be one of the more affordable platforms on the market compared to its competitors. Additionally, its tools for user tagging is a feature that some other platforms do not offer – a feature that is paramount for some of our clients, and therefore a non-negotiable.
Room for Improvement?
Although we have used Loomly for three years, there are a few improvements and new features that we’d like to see made to the platform in the future.
Custom Branding
We’d love to see custom branding for all plans on Loomly, which would allow us to have custom subdomains with a branded URL, in addition to a custom logo. Currently, this feature is only available on the ‘Beyond’ plan.
Location Tagging
Although Loomly offers user tagging, we’d also like to see location tagging available for Instagram. This would allow us to promote traffic to our clients, creating opportunities to engage with audiences.
Reporting for All Channels
Currently, reporting is only available for Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. It would be beneficial to have reporting available for all social media channels, including Google My Business. This would allow us to easily see insights into audience behaviour and content performance, to better manage content creation going forward. It would also remove the need for us to have to login to individual channels to see their analytics, which currently takes time.
Live Chat
Unfortunately, the Loomly support live chat is being phased out soon, replaced with a contact form. In the past, we have had a good experience with Loomly live chat support, however, since this is being phased out, we have experienced delays with initial responses when submitting a support request via the contact form. We are hopeful that this will improve; however, a live chat is useful.
Overview
Loomly transforms the complexities of social media management into a streamlined, collaborative process. It offers a robust solution for everything from content creation and team approval workflows to publishing and analytics. Ultimately, we chose Loomly because it acts as a central content manager, where content quality is maintained through built-in review, and our team can focus less on manual tasks and more on creating engaging, high-impact content.
If you’re ready to increase traffic to your website, position your business as an industry expert, and boost search rankings, Ballyhoo can help with our content marketing services. Contact us now for more information.
