For small businesses, social media content marketing plays a large role in awareness and potential sales. It can become a stressful activity due to the state of real-time updates we have come to expect in our fast-paced society. Scheduling social media posts removes the worry of making sure your posts get out on time, and we found Loomly to be one of the best tools for this purpose.
Note: This is not a sponsored post, we just really enjoy Loomly.
What is Loomly?
Loomly is a social media scheduling service. It allows you to add multiple social media accounts linked to multiple social media profiles. This is great for small businesses but even better for small marketing agencies.
The service allows you to include text, images and video to your post and then schedule it for an appropriate time.
Loomly also allows you to schedule social media posts in a streamlined flow, which can be tailored depending on your requirements. For example, you can set it to simple (Draft, Scheduled) or more robust (Draft, Pending Approval, Scheduled, Published).
What Are The Benefits of Loomly?
- Scheduling is a breeze – schedule posts individually or as a group, in time slots or whenever you need to. Loomly is flexible when it comes to scheduling, which can be automatically scheduled or saved for someone else to approve first.
- Designed for collaboration – add collaborators and notifiy them when changes have been made. Collaborators can be assigned various roles depending on what they need to do on the account (approval, editing, etc.). This helps remove a lot of back and forth emails that can fill up your inbox very quickly. You can also seperate each account into its own calendar, so accounts don’t see what the others are posting
- Simple workflow for approval – some tools simply allow for approval of posts, but Loomly takes it one step further with custom workflow setups. Here you are able to even assign multiple people to each post. We really enjoy the feature where each time a change is made, a record is kept and timestamped so you can easily manage changes being made
- Asset management – once files have been uploaded, you’ll never lose them thanks to the simple media library. The library comes with various filters as well as the ability to filter
- Analytics – if you don’t already have a social media analytics tool then Loomly can help out here, allowing you to view various metrics. Simple metrics such as number of likes, views, impressions, reach, demographics and more can all be viewed here
- Custom Branding – you have the ability to share custom white-labeled content with your clients (or yourself), including the ability to add in a logo and custom URL
- Mobile app – we use the app whenever we’re out of office. It’s very simple and comes with all the same features as the website
- Slack and Teams integration – Loomly have recently updated their tool to allow Slack and Teams integration which we can’t wait to try!
How Much Does Loomly Cost?
One of the main benefits of Loomly is its low cost when compared to similar services out on the market. We’ve tried many others, including Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, and a few more. Loomly proved to be the most cost-effective for our needs.
Loomly is available through a subscription, either on a yearly basis (saves 25% versus the monthly billing option):
Or on a monthly basis (most flexible option):
Currently, we’re using the Standard option, which allows for multiple users and up to 20 social media accounts. When compared to other tools, this came to be the cheapest by far.
Disadvantages of using Loomly
While using Loomly, it still has a few downsides. Depending on what you share on social media, these can play a big role in how you manage your posts:
- Multiple video uploads aren’t allowed for now – after trying multiple ways of doing this, it seems only one video can be posted within one post
- No auto-scheduling – this is a feature present in other social media tools (such as Hootsuite) which allows automatically posts at the optimal time to maximise reach while preventing overposting
- No social listening – no ability to track social media mentions or conversations related to the linked social media account
Loomly versus its competition
As mentioned above, we’ve tried and tested many other scheduling tools. However, when it comes to price, Loomly was the clear winner for us. Below are some of the advantages we’ve found Loomly has over its competition:
- Can be cheaper according to your organisational layout – Loomly can be cheaper in the long when using multiple social media accounts. Many competitors might be cheaper for a single account (or even free), however, Loomly was cheaper for us when connected to multiple clients.
- Post previews are useful – before posting, Loomly allows you to preview what the post will look like on ALL of your accounts, even as a grid preview for Instagram!
- Affordable collaboration – many competitors do offer collaboration, but Loomly has it mastered. More of our clients are now using the collaboration tools making everyones’ lives a whole lot easier
Conclusion – a social media scheduler on a budget
When compared to other scheduling tools, Loomly does it all and at a much cheaper cost. We have been using Loomly now for about 6 months and we have enjoyed every moment. Their support has always been efficient and the tool itself has never given us any major issues.
