Ready to start your free Loomly trial?
Our trial lets you enjoy our core features for free for 15 days – with no credit card required. Custom Branding and Loom.ly URL shortener are exclusive to paid plans and will be unlocked once you subscribe.
Here is a guide so you can learn more and get started with Loomly:
Introduction
Loomly was built on a calendar basis, meaning you will create a calendar for each brand, client, project, or location that you manage.
Currently, Loomly only allows you to connect one social media account of each platform per Calendar (Facebook, X/Twitter, Google Business Profile, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, LinkedIn, Threads & Custom Channel).
You can view all your calendars from the Calendars widget of your Dashboard. Here's a video overview of Loomly's Dashboard.
If you have more than one calendar, we also provide All Calendars. This acts as a single, consolidated super calendar for all of your calendars!
Setting up your Account
1. Confirm your email address if you haven't had a chance to do so already
2. Create your first calendar following the "Create a New Calendar" steps
Set your calendar details
Connect your social media accounts
Set a Calendar Workflow that best suits your needs
Set Post Ideas Preferences by entering RSS feeds
Invite collaborators to access the calendar
📝 Note: You can always configure these later within Calendar Settings after you create your calendar.
3. Create additional calendars for your other locations and brands, or start creating content with Loomly for your first calendar!
Different Views of Loomly
Loomly offers a few different views so you can easily view, plan, and collaborate for the content you have created in your Loomly calendar.
1. List View
List View provides an intuitive, easy-to-follow view of your posts for the month.
Here are some actions you can take from List View:
Browse, sort, filter, and duplicate your posts
Assign one or more collaborators to a post
Update the post status
Apply bulk actions to your posts
2. Calendar View
Calendar View provides a strategic overview of your month's content.
Here are a few actions you can take from Calendar View:
Edit, duplicate, and filter posts
Create a Quick Post, which can be used as reminders or if you have an idea for a post but don't know what content you'd like for it quite yet
Drag and drop posts to quickly reschedule posts
Group and ungroup posts with customized dates
Preview media and caption for each social media channel by hovering
3. Post View
Post View is an essential view for collaborative purposes. You can access it by clicking on the Subject link from Calendar or List Views.
Here are a few actions you can take from Post View:
Preview the posts for each social media channel
Update the post status
Assign one or multiple collaborators
Leave internal comments for your team by @mentioning them, pinning comments, or making comments private so those assigned to the Client role will not see them.
There is also a setting to leave private comments by default so external stakeholders aren't mistakenly involved before the post is ready for their review.
Duplicate the post
Edit posts if a post has not yet been published
View published post links
View logs of your posts
Download media files
When a collaborator has been assigned to the post, they will receive an email notification with a link to Post View.
4. Post Ideas View
Post Ideas View provides events, holidays, & celebrations happening on specific dates if you need ideas for content, and it can be accessed from the lightbulb icon from your calendar's toolbar.
Here are a few actions you can take from Post Ideas View:
View Loomly Ideas and Custom Post Ideas for content inspiration
Create a post from a Post Idea
Create Custom Post Ideas for any events, launches, or campaigns that can be recurring or not
Post Builder
Post Builder guides you through the process of creating a social media post.
1. Generic Content
Post Ideas: Do you need any ideas for a post? We've got you covered as we provide Post Ideas for content Inspiration! We offer 5 different types of Post Ideas:
1. X/Twitter Trends: trending topics from X/Twitter in your location
2. RSS feeds: RSS items from your own custom selection of content feeds
3. Loomly Inspirations: recurring, broad ideas based on best practices & Internet codes
4. Loomly Ideas: events, holidays & celebrations happening on specific dates
5. Custom Post Ideas: your own customized post ideas that can be recurring or not
📝 Note: X/Twitter Trends and RSS feed URLs can be configured for your calendar in the Post Ideas tab of Calendar Settings.
Schedule Date & Time: Set a generic date and time for your post to apply to all selected channels.
📝 Note: This is the date & time displayed in the List & Calendar Views, so we recommend editing the date and time in this step to better track your posts.
You can select a Scheduling Slot you've created in your Calendar Settings or pick a custom date & time.
Subject: Add a title for your post, which can be used as an internal reference within Loomly
Clone Post to more Calendars: You can easily clone your posts to other calendars if the post you create is one you would like to create for other calendars.
Post Labels: Tag posts in Post Builder and identify at a glance throughout Loomly what campaign or category they belong to. For instance, you can create labels for specific campaigns or types of posts, such as blog posts, sponsored posts, product posts, etc.
📝 Note: You can also filter posts by labels in the List & Calendar Views and even filter your Post Metrics table in Advanced Analytics by labels.
Select Social Channels
Select the social media channels you would like to create the post for Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok & Custom Channel. You can read more about the supported post types for each platform here.
Define Generic Content
In this step, you'll define the content and media applied to all your selected channels in the previous step.
Here are other things you can do:
Add media to your post in a few different ways:
Calendar Library Assets including exported Canva designs
Add stock images from across the web with our Unsplash integration
Add images and videos from Google Drive
GIFs with our Giphy integration
Upload a single image, multiple images, a single PDF, or a single video from your device, or upload them all at once by dragging and dropping them into Post Builder
Import media from a URL
Add alt text and video cover images to any supported channels
Edit your images with Loomly Studio
Enter emojis with the Emoji keyboard
Add, edit, and apply Hashtag Collections to save time by storing your commonly used hashtags in a Hashtag Collection
Apply UTM parameters to your URLs so you can track your performance through Google Analytics
Shorten your URLs with Loomly's loom.ly URL shortener, so you don't take any extra characters. As an added bonus, we also display clicks, sources, and locations for Loom.ly shortened URLs in Advanced Analytics!
Advanced capabilities for clearing customization options including:
Clear all date fine-tuning
Clear all caption fine-tuning
Clear all media fine-tuning
2. Fine-Tune Content
If you would like to customize either the scheduled date and time, caption, or even media files, this step is where you can customize your post for specific channels.
This step allows you to do the following:
Preview your posts for each social media channel that you selected
Update the scheduled date & time for a specific channel if you know a specific channel performs better on a specific day of the week or time
Select different post types (e.g. Feed or Stories) for Facebook and Instagram
Update the caption for a specific channel
Add any channel-specific information such as Instagram Collaborators, product tags, and more
Update media files by replacing, adding, or removing the media files uploaded in the previous step.
View Post Optimization Tips
You can also reset media changes if you prefer to revert the customized media attachments, scheduling, caption, or all for a channel to the generic content and scheduling.
Target Audience & Promote (Available for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram)
This is optional, but you can target your audience for Facebook and LinkedIn pages and boost posts for these platforms and Instagram.
Facebook: Organically target and restrict your audience for Facebook Page posts. You can also boost your Facebook posts with the Post Sponsoring options.
Instagram: You can boost your posts with the Post Sponsoring options.
LinkedIn: Organically target your audience by industries, seniorities, functions, company size, languages, and/or locations for LinkedIn Company Page posts. You can also boost your posts with the Post Sponsoring options.
3. Create Post at any point in the post creation process
You will be able to access these buttons on the bottom footer bar:
Save Progress (to save work as you are creating your post(
Save as Draft (to take you to the Post View)
Submit for Approval
Schedule
Publish it Now
Depending on your Calendar Settings or assigned role, you may see different steps available.
📝 Note: The fine-tuning panel will override the generic content panel. If you have customized a channel, please update any customized channels to apply the updates if you would like to edit the customized channels too.
You can also view which channels have been customized from the Generic Content step by expanding the note:
💡 Tip: You can see posts with customized dates and times with the post variations icon (e.g., x2) next to the generic date and time by hovering your cursor over the icon.
Library
The Library acts as a digital asset management tool that lets you store, organize, and use your assets.
You can access the Library from both List & Calendar Views via the Library icon from the calendar's toolbar.
Inside a calendar's Library, you can do the following:
Upload photos, videos, and PDFs to use later
Access any exported Canva designs: once you've connected Loomly as an app in Canva, you can drag and drop assets from your Library into the Canva editor or export finalized designs to your Library
Upload assets from Google Drive
Create new posts from your assets
Edit new and existing files metadata, for instance, renaming assets per your internal conventions
Create Notes and Post Templates
Apply labels to multiple files with bulk actions for easy organization
Create videos from images
View a bigger preview of your media asset and collaborate in Asset View by copying the URL of the asset
Collaborating with your team and clients
When you invite collaborators to Loomly, they will need to create an account but do not need to subscribe to a plan. Your collaborators can use Loomly for free as long as they do not create calendars of their own. Each person participating in a calendar (including clients) is considered a user, so you can invite as many collaborators as you want within your plan’s limitations.
1. Inviting Collaborators
Collaborators will only be granted access to the calendars they have been invited to collaborate in.
Here is how you can invite a collaborator:
You can invite collaborators from the Collaborators tab of Calendar Settings, where you can also remove a collaborator's access to a calendar or update their role.
Manage Users also provides you with an overview of the users on your plan. You can access the Manage Users section from the Users section of Account Settings or click the "Manage users" link within your plan's information.
You can invite users, grant them access to other calendars by assigning their role, update user roles for each calendar, and remove users from your subscription.
📝 Note: Even if a collaborator has access to multiple calendars, they will only be counted as one user.
2. Roles
Loomly has 5 predefined collaborator roles: Owner, Editor, Contributor, Viewer, and Client.
Collaborators can be invited to the Editor, Contributor, View, or Client role. You can read more about the permissions offered on each role here.
We also offer Custom Roles, available in our Advanced Plan and up, where you can create customized roles to limit what permissions a collaborator has. Not only can you create tailor-made sets of permissions for each of your team members, but you can also limit the dates of the posts they can see, which is particularly useful if a collaboration has a pre-established end date.
📝 Note: The Owner role can't be assigned (as this role is automatically assigned to the user who created the calendar). Owners will need to subscribe to a plan, but collaborators can always transfer a calendar to a subscriber if necessary.
3. Posts Status and Assignments
You and your collaborators can update the post status or the post assignees from List View or Post View.
Depending on your calendar's workflow, here are the post statuses that you will see:
Draft: Posts in the draft state will not be visible to those assigned to the Client role.
Requires Edits: This post status can be used if the post is not approved and needs edits.
Pending Approval: When a post is ready for your approvers to review, use this post status and assign the approvers.
Approved: Approvers can set the post status from Pending Approval to Approved
Scheduled: The post must be in the Scheduled status before the scheduled time to directly publish the post at the scheduled time or to receive push notifications to manually publish the post.
📝 Note: Select "Schedule for publishing" so the post is automatically published or so you receive a push notification to manually publish the post
Published: The post was successfully published or Marked as Published (meaning it was manually published).
Canceled: This post status can be selected if you created content for a post that you no longer would like to publish but prefer not to delete. This is ideal if the client or collaborator does not approve the post, the content is no longer relevant, or perhaps you created several versions of the post with the intent to move forward with the best option.
Passed: The Passed status appears when the post's scheduled time and date has passed because the post was not scheduled in time.
📝 Note: If the post is in the Passed status, please edit the post's scheduled date and time in Step 1 of Post Builder (or Step 2 if the post has a customized date & time), so you can save any post edits or reschedule the post.
📝 Note: The collaborator must be assigned to the post to receive a Loomly notification. Only updating the post status will not send a notification unless you have Assignment Triggers set up for Custom Workflows (available only on our Advanced Plan and up).
Posts can be assigned to one or more collaborators from Post View or List View.
4. Approval Workflows
We offer 3 different approval workflows, which can be updated from the Workflow tab of Calendar Settings.
Depending on your calendar's workflow, there will be different post statuses available. We recommend choosing that workflow that best suits your needs depending on the number of collaborators responsible for approvals.
📝 Note: With Lite and Zero Workflows, your collaborator will need to update the post status to "Schedule" if they approve the post.
5. Custom Workflow (available for users on the Advanced Plan or higher)
Custom Workflow settings allow you to control Assignment Triggers and State Guards to streamline your approval process and boost your team's efficiency. This can be configured in the Workflow tab of Calendar Settings.
Assignment Triggers will automatically assign users listed once the status of a post has been updated. Rather than manually assigning the posts to your collaborators, you can set a Trigger to automatically assign users for different post statuses based on your Custom Workflow settings.
State Guards require action from one or more users to move the post into the guarded state. This is useful if you would like posts to be approved by specific users or to prevent your collaborators from scheduling posts before the post has been acted upon by specific users.
You can read more about Custom Workflows here.
6. Export Content
Content Export lets you extend collaboration offline and overview your activities, which is useful for offline meetings and offline approvals.
You can export the following:
List View, Calendar View, and Post View as PDF files
Advanced Analytics as a PDF or CSV file
To manually export content, you simply need to click on the Export Content icon from the calendar's toolbar:
Set up Scheduled Reports to have a recurring schedule to automate sending Analytics PDF reports to several recipients.
7. Notifications
Your notification settings can be accessed from the Notifications tab of your Account Settings.
You can either disable email notifications for certain activities or update the email frequency for specific activities for each calendar you can access.
You can also uncheck the activities for which you do not want to receive mobile push notifications.
With the Advanced Plan and up, you can connect Slack and Microsoft Teams to receive your Loomly notifications in those workspaces!
Engaging with your fans and followers using Interactions
With Interactions, you can reply to the following:
Facebook comments, mentions, and messages
X/Twitter comments, mentions, and messages
Instagram comments, mentions, and messages
LinkedIn comments and mentions
TikTok comments
📝 Note: Some interactions may not be available depending on your account type.
You can access the Interactions Management Tool by going into a calendar, then selecting the Interactions icon from your calendar's toolbar.
For Interactions, here are some other features we have available:
Update the status of your interactions as Unread, Read, or Archived on the individual interactions level or the collective status level
Assign a collaborator to an interaction or view the collaborator who replied to a specific interaction
Efficiently respond to your fans and followers by creating and applying saved replies to maintain brand voice and consistency
Measuring your success with Analytics
We offer Analytics, allowing you to measure your success and see what types of posts are performing better so you can loop this back into your planning process.
We offer two types of Analytics depending on your plan: Advanced Analytics and Basic Analytics. You can read more about our Analytics feature here.
Advanced Analytics will be offered during the trial and on the Standard Plan and up
Basic Analytics displays basic metrics such as comments, likes and shares. This is available in the Analytics Dashboard and Post View if you are on the Base Plan or if you haven't activated Advanced Analytics yet.
For more information, you can look at our other FAQ articles, and please let us know if there is anything we can do to assist!