Summary: In this episode of the Sensible Sessions podcast, Amber Wardell discusses the impact of TikTok on creators’ careers and the importance of diversifying social media presence. She introduces Loomly, a social media scheduling tool that she finds invaluable for managing content across multiple platforms. Amber provides a detailed tutorial on how to use Loomly effectively, emphasizing its user-friendly interface and features that cater to creators’ needs. She concludes with thoughts on the significance of maintaining an active presence on various platforms to safeguard against potential disruptions. 

Keywords: TikTok, social media, diversification, Loomly, content scheduling, creator economy, digital marketing, social media strategy, online presence, audience engagement

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to TikTok’s Impact
02:46 The Importance of Diversification
04:58 Navigating Loomly’s Features
15:56 Creating and Scheduling Posts with Loomly
23:00 Final Thoughts on Social Media Management

Transcript

Amber Wardell, PhD (00:01)
Hello and welcome back to the Sensible Sessions podcast. It’s going to be just me today and this one is going to be a little bit more of a functional, practical type of podcast than what I usually do. I’m just going to, I’m just going to just jump right into it because I think this is just going to be one of those that we don’t need a lot of, we don’t need a lot of preamble for. If you saw the title, you know why we’re here. Okay. You all remember last year when the TikTok ban happened. That was a year ago, right?

No, that was like last week. Yeah. Okay. It’s been, it’s been a difficult week or so for some of us, right? So we had the 12 hour tick tock band, the one that we heard about for close to a year, I think, and we’re threatened about this for so very long. And many of us didn’t believe it was going to happen. then right around the beginning of January, it started to look like it actually was going to happen. And for many of us,

TikTok was a place that is a place that wasn’t just a place for having fun and connecting with friends and new people. It became a place for many of us that we used to launch a career. For me personally, this was the thing in my opinion that got me my agent, my literary agent and my book deal. It got me my publisher. has been what has.

catapulted me into all of the really cool opportunities that I have had now as an author. Unfortunately, that’s just the name of the game these days. You have to have a large social media platform if you want to get your seat at the table, so to speak. And I’ve been really blessed and fortunate that TikTok has given me that. And that’s been the reality for a lot of people. TikTok, for better or worse.

did give a lot of people the leg up and the opportunity that they needed to really change their lives and make a big difference for themselves and for their families.

And so as it became more and more clear that like, looked like this TikTok ban was going to happen. there were those of us who have kind of been around social media for a while, who already knew this fact that I’m about to share. And then there were others who began learning this, this little fact really quickly. that was moving an audience from your main platform to other platforms is not as easy as one might think.

You do have this mindset that like, well, have these people, they like me, they’re my fans, they’re my followers. All I have to do is just tell them this app is going away. Come find me at these other places and they will. But the truth is, that’s very hard to do. And especially in an app like TikTok, where you never know what percentage of your followers are actually people who followed you from one video and have never engaged with you again. Those numbers can be a little deceiving.

And so this was a scary time for myself and for a lot of us who have used TikTok to build a business or a brand or promote their book or their art or their music or anything else. was just scary.

And so now that we’ve all had a little bit of time to catch our breaths and realize that TikTok isn’t going away, at least not for right now. Now I think a lot of us are thinking about, okay, I don’t ever want to be a one trick pony again. I don’t ever want to become shackled to one platform ever again. So that I find myself in this position once again, where a platform is being taken from me and I feel as though my financial

safety and security. My business brand book or career is in jeopardy.

And in any other way, having to scramble to figure out how I’m going to pay my bills next month as a result of this one platform being taken away from me. And I think for most of us, that answer is I have to diversify.

In my opinion, it’s always best to always be diversifying because it’s very hard to try to diversify when you are in panic mode. Right. And so what I want to share today is a tool that I’ve been using for a little over a year now. I’ll go ahead and say upfront, this is a paid tool. And I will also say upfront that this is in no way sponsored by this app. I have not been compensated at all.

I just truly love this app and I think that now is a really good time to share it for all of the creators out there who are telling themselves, I don’t ever want to find myself in this situation ever again.

So what we’re going to be doing today is I’m going to be speaking to you about an app called Loomly. It is by far, and I spent a lot of time researching apps like this one. It is by far the best social media scheduler I have used to date. And I’m going to unpack why I think that is as this video goes on. This video is going to contain a little bit of tutorial to it where I’m just going to show you the interface itself and how to use it. So if you are watching or excuse me,

This video is going to contain a little bit of tutorial screen sharing in it. I’m going to just walk you through the interface and how to use it. So I will say if you’re listening only on a streaming service, I will put a link in the show notes to the YouTube video so that you can come watch just in case you listen and this sounds interesting and you’d like to come see the actual screen share. And I’m going to be putting timestamps down below so that you can jump around if there are just certain parts that you want to see.

But before I jump into all that, we’re gonna have a brief word from our sponsor, the only sponsor of this video, which is me. So let’s roll that.

Okay, so now that we’re back, we’re gonna jump into this. We’re gonna talk about Loomly. Loomly is a scheduler app for social media. It’s probably similar to things like Hootsuite and things like that, which I haven’t used extensively. I’ve purchased the free trials for a lot of these apps and then ended up for whatever reason, not using them. And I’ll quickly name off some of the reasons why other apps didn’t work for me.

A lot of them didn’t have integrations with a wide enough array of social media platforms that I was using. And so that was a deal breaker for me. A lot of them didn’t provide a way for me to post to multiple accounts, meaning, you know, I have like my personal accounts and then I have my business account, or in this case now I have my Amber Wardell accounts and then I have my podcast accounts and I’m posting separate content to those two pages.

So that was a problem. Some of these apps were free and because they were free, they were just, they didn’t offer enough.

And because they were free, they just were a little bit too rudimentary. They didn’t offer enough features that I needed. On the other hand, some of them were just completely cost prohibitive. And in my opinion, they also had way too much of a learning curve. It felt like maybe they were more for like social media managers. You know what I mean? Like the people that you are paying to run your social media, they’re using those apps.

And so all of those kind of got ruled out for me. Loomly was the only one that I found that felt affordable. And I’ll get into the budget in a moment. It was easy to use. It had the widest variety of social media platforms that I found of all the things that I looked at. And I will say I have found them in the year that I have been with them to also be very timely at updating their interface.

to include new things as they roll out. And I’ll get into that as I go, but as an example, they had threads integrated with their interface within a few weeks of when threads rolled out. I’m still waiting for them to get Blue Sky integrated. Don’t know if that’s gonna happen, but as you’ll see in a moment, they seem to be pretty good about rolling out new features as they come.

I’m going to go ahead and say, don’t recall if there is a free trial or if there’s a free version of the app altogether. there may be, what I will say is if there is a free version, I didn’t use it long enough to remember anything about it, which tells me it must have not been very good. Like that tells me that either the free version had so few features that it really wasn’t worth using or

The paid version was so compelling that I was like, it’s a no brainer. have to pay for it. So the paid version is when I bought in, which was a year ago, is $44 a month. I haven’t looked to see if that number has gone up. Maybe we can take a look when I go. I haven’t looked to see if that number has gone up, but I’m pretty sure it’s still the same. I’ll correct it in the show notes. If it isn’t, I find that to be a pretty fair number, given what some of these platforms are asking for to do your social media scheduling.

And again, given all the features that you get, I just think it’s super fair.

I also think just to wrap up this preamble and then we’re going to get into the tutorial. I also think there’s never been a better time to be using a scheduler because it feels like for the first time ever, all the different apps have kind of like gotten on the same page about a few things, meaning finally all the vertical video apps have a three minute feature. So finally, for the first time ever shorts, TikTok,

and Instagram reels and Facebook all have three minute long videos that you can post, which is huge. So that is a, is a big, just a big game changer all around for when it comes to repurposing content. And I lied. There’s one more thing I want to say about this hands down. Like we can, we just all be really honest about the fact that there is no app out there that, you know what? This is related to my last point. So I’m, I’m gonna, it’s related to the last one.

There’s nothing better for editing your content natively within the app than TikTok. I would love it if Shorts and Instagram would up their game a little bit, but it doesn’t, it’s not looking like they’re going to do that. but TikTok recently in their last algorithm update made it so that when you post your video, I don’t know if you’ve, you’ve probably noticed this, but when you post your video, you now get a watermark free copy.

of your video that just saves to your phone, which is huge because if you’ve been doing this for any time whatsoever and you’ve been repurposing your content already, you probably are using an app like Musically Down and Snap Insta to remove those watermarks. And thankfully now TikTok is doing that for you. You’re getting a copy of your content without the watermarks on it. So now,

You can actually do your filming and editing natively within CapCut or TikTok. Get your unwatermarked copy from the TikTok app and then go into Loomly to schedule it, to put it everywhere else. And so I just think there’s serendipity right now about like all of these things coming together to make it never more, more sensible to use Loomly. And so I just think we should just hop on in. Okay. So let me go ahead and share my screen so we can take a look at what we’re doing here.

Okay. So don’t, don’t be overwhelmed. All right. This is my Loomly page from last month. And as you can see, I had days where I had days where I had tons of things scheduled and I had days where I really didn’t. but this is, your girl’s been busy, you know, I’ve been posting a lot of stuff. I’m to walk you through how all of this is done. This was from January. we can head on into February. This is.

This is today, I’m filming this on Monday the 27th. So this morning I sat down and I scheduled out, these are my static posts that I do every day. And as you can see here, these get posted at 9.15 a.m. every day, which this is a thing that’s great. think that it’s good to post spontaneously on social media for sure, but I think it’s good to have a few things that you post like clockwork that your followers know to look for at a certain time.

So even though these are static posts, like let’s see if I can pull one up here. Even though these are static posts, these tend to get lots and lots of engagement, even though static posts don’t tend to get a lot of engagement on Instagram, these do. And that’s because for over a year now, I’ve been training my followers to know that at 9.15 AM, they can expect a post from me. Okay, I’m gonna show you how this all works.

So as you can see, I have every day at 9.15 a.m. a post that goes up to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and threads. Every day this week, which is amazing. I’m gonna go up here into pages, because I wanna show you this really quickly. As you can see, I have an all calendars button here where I can see all of my calendars, but I have Amber’s pages, which is just my Amber Wardell pages. And then I have my Sensible Sessions podcast, which I only have hooked up

to Facebook page at this time. And you can see I’m not posting a whole bunch on this page right now, because I think I have, it’s just, it’s a new page. I haven’t gotten in the groove yet. But this is really nice because this is kind of separating out things that I’m doing on this page, this different Facebook page than I’m doing on my other pages. So, and there’s no additional charge with the package that I have, the $44 a month package.

for me to do this. And I wish I knew, I wish I’d looked up before I did this, what the limit is for that, but having two was no problem at all. Let’s see if I can. Okay, so I can have collaborators on this, which means that if I do have someone who schedules my posts for me, let’s say that I film my content and then they post it, like they put it in and they add the captions and all that stuff. I can have collaborators who come in under my login.

or not under my login, I guess have their own login, but they don’t have to pay for the service, which is a really nice thing. we can work with our calendar settings. There’s some really, complex stuff here. can set up workflows and whatnot, which is above my pay grade. So I’m not going to spend much time on it, but this is a cool thing. If you want to do more advanced stuff with this, what I’m not, I’m not going to get into this today.

I also think what’s cool is they do offer education within Loomly. They’ll teach you stuff that you can be posting about. You can pull in RSS feeds. RSS feeds are just like topics, things that you’re interested in, news feeds and podcast feeds and whatnot that you can have brought in to Loomly.

to show you kind of what’s trending, what people are talking about that day. And you can use that, like if you don’t know what to post about for the day, you can actually see, my gosh, everyone’s talking about such and such, and you can use that as inspiration, which I think is really cool.

All right, so I’m go back to my main page and I just wanna walk you through, I’m trying to keep this video short, but I wanna just walk you through how easy this can be to repurpose and schedule your content. As you can see, I can kinda switch, gosh.

As you can see, I can switch between a list view and a calendar view. The list view is cool because it lets you be able to see kind of everything. You can see the media and the copy and everything, but this gets overwhelming for me. So I like to keep it in the calendar view.

So let’s just pretend like we’re going to make a post together today. So I’m going to go into today. I’m going to add a post. What’s kind of cool is I was able to preload in here certain times that I prefer to post. So this already knows that I post something at 9 15 every day. I try to post something at 11 30 every day, but that time has already passed and I didn’t schedule anything for that time. So Loomly knows that I can’t post at that time.

So when I go in to add a new post, it says, all right, you want to do four o’clock? And I’m like, yeah, that sounds good. So I go into build post and you can see here, I, not going to walk you through linking your accounts because that’s easy. It walks you through exactly what to do. You don’t have to, don’t have to sweat over that, but I have linked everything here except Google and Snapchat just cause I don’t use those. There’s also a custom channel that you can set up again.

above my pay grade and not something that I need. So I don’t know how to use that. Good luck if you want to use it, but we can use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google, YouTube, both YouTube and YouTube shorts, which is really cool. TikTok and threads. Okay. We can edit the time we want to post it. We can name it if we have like a certain campaign or something that we’re using this for. And then if we have actual

campaign names that we’re using, can put them here.

Okay. So let’s just say that I’m going to, I want to post a video. I was messing with a, one of the filters on CapCut the other day. So let’s bring this one in. This is where CapCut did me dirty and it turned me and my husband, Charlie into what I think looks like Steve Bannon and Mark Zuckerberg. If you want to see it, let’s open

Alright, so here’s my video, I’ve pulled it in.

You see this? It’s Steve Bannon and Zuck. What has happened here? It did me dirty. Did me dirty. So from here, I can do a few things. I can crop it, trim it. I can add filters. I can fine tune a few things like brightness, contrast, exposure, all that stuff. And while I’m in there, I can also edit the cover image, which is cool. If I have a custom cover image I want to use, I can upload that from my camera roll.

And I can also pick a frame from the video if I’d rather do that. So it’ll update it there.

Okay, once I’ve got my media uploaded, things are so easy from there. I can just select where I want this to be uploaded. So I’m going to pick, I just realized it’s shaking the camera every time I do this.

Let’s try to be more still. All right, so for shakiness sake, I’m just going to do Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. All right. Down here, we can write our caption. So this is where, just like you would be doing on Instagram or TikTok, you write what you want to go in the caption. You can add your hashtags, you can use emojis, you can do an at mention. Anything you could do for the most part in the description box with natively within the platform, you can do right here.

Now I know what you’re thinking, but wait a minute, there’s different character limits. There’s, there’s certain things that I can do on some platforms that I can’t do on others. This is the thing I love about Loomly. So you get all done, right? Let me just type something out really quickly. And I’m going to cut this part out so that you don’t have to watch yourself getting all jostled around.

Okay. So I’ve done a couple of things. One, I’ve just written out some gibberish here that I know is going to be too long for at least Twitter, if not some of the other ones. And I’ve put in a link here. one thing that Loomly can do that will help you out a little bit is that it will shorten your links, just so that if you have one of those super long links, it won’t eat up your characters within your post. but you can also turn that off. So I’m using like Amber Wardell.com super short. I don’t want to shorten that. want people to be able to see it.

and I know what you’re also thinking, but Amber, can’t use links in all the platforms. That’s okay. Loomly can deal with that too. Okay. So I have now set up my general info. I’m in the J you see this here. I’m in the generic content page, but now I can click next and I can go into the fine tuning of my content. And this is what I love so much, about Loomly. Okay. So from here, I can do many things. I can decide for Facebook if I want this to go to my feed.

or to reels or stories or if it’s gonna be a carousel.

I can mess with the target audience and promote the post from natively here within Loomly, which is super cool. if I have a link that’s going to show a preview, often it won’t do this if you are actually showing a video, but sometimes if you’re hosting, but sometimes if you’re posting a link that has like a big cover image with it, it’s going to try to show like the actual link preview and it will sometimes cover up what you’re trying to show in your actual.

post so you can tell it to remove the link preview so that it won’t do that, which I think is really awesome. When you switch to Reels, you can just kind of see what it would look like if you do it that way. And you can also just preview it from all the different ways that this might look. Obviously, a carousel is going to look bad with a video format. All right, we can go into Twitter. And here you can see it’s telling me how over I am with my character limit.

So now I have the chance to actually individually edit this caption for Twitter. So what I can do is I can go make this one shorter.

And now this one is, you see that exclamation point went away. So Twitter is now ready to go, but I have not changed any of my other descriptions here. See that? I just love it so much. So I know Twitter’s ready to go because I don’t have any warnings here. I can go to Instagram. I wanted to show you guys for Instagram. You can post to feed.

and stories. I’m not sure why Reels isn’t coming up, but it’ll post it as a reel if it’s video format. So you don’t have to worry about that. You can actually add a comment so that when it posts, it will go ahead and add that comment first, which I like to do every now and then. It can kind of boost engagement if you ask a question. And I try to remember when I do that to go back in and pin that question to the top so that people can come and answer it. If you like to set your location on Instagram, you can do that as well.

And if you’re wanting to tag anyone, can do that here. However, my one gripe is that I have noticed that when I do this here, it doesn’t actually like physically tag them in the post on Instagram. have to go do that manually. So I’ve I’m putting in a ticket with them about that, but just something of note.

So I’m still getting the notice that YouTube is incomplete. And that’s because when you post to YouTube, you have to add a title to it. So it’s going to do this until I add a title. Yee. And once I have a title, it’s gonna let me post that as well. Now it’s because this is in vertical format and because it is short form, it’s gonna go ahead and post it as a short. And what I love about this is you don’t actually have to worry about that.

Loomly will make those decisions for you and it’s never failed. Like it’s just never gotten it wrong, which is amazing. I just, love when the AI is AI-ing, you know, it’s just nice. And then all I have to do is press schedule and this will get added to my calendar. Now you can also click this up arrow and click publish now if you’re just ready to post it.

A lot of times that’s what I end up doing. Like, if I just have a spontaneous thought that I want to share, will go film it natively on Tik TOK and then I’ll, I’ll post it to Tik TOK and then I’ll just, can put the, there’s another great thing I didn’t point out, but you can, install this Loomly app on your phone. It’s very user friendly, on the phone. And you can just go do all of this in the mobile app and post it right after you’ve posted it to Tik TOK.

You can go into Loomly and post it right away to all of your other apps as well. It takes less than two or three minutes. It’s just amazing. So you can certainly go in and do publish now if you want to, or you can click schedule and God, let me not forget to unschedule this. You know what? Let me just do this while we’re here. Um, so where is today? Here we are. So we can see now that this post that I just made is going up on all of my socials today at four o’clock.

So we can see here that this post, if I don’t delete it now, is going to go up on all my socials today at four o’clock. We’re going to delete this now because I don’t want this going up later. Everyone’s going to be like, Ambers. Okay. Ambers lost it. Look out everybody. Let’s delete this post. Yes. Okay. All right.

So friends, that’s it. That is Loomly in a nutshell. Like I said, you can use it on your desktop and also on mobile, which is really great. It’s user friendly. It’s pretty affordable in my opinion. And I think even if you’re going like, if you’re kind of like cringing a little bit at the price, I do think that if you’re someone who is using social media to grow your business or promote your book or your art, I just think it’s a worthy investment in yourself, especially if you don’t want to find yourself.

having a, your main platform being taken from you or being threatened to be taken from you again and scrambling. I promise you, if you just get in the habit of doing this with every single post you post, post it, go to Loomly, share it everywhere else. Even if you’re shouting into the void, into these other platforms where it’s only like your parents and your cousins following you, keep doing it.

You don’t even have to go and engage on those platforms if you just don’t have the time and the energy right now. Just why miss out on an opportunity to get some reach? I’ve been doing this. I don’t engage on Twitter. I freaking hate that place, but I just checked the other day and I’ve gained hundreds of followers on Twitter and I don’t even open the app. So use this as a way, just as an insurance policy. You know what I mean?

to make sure that if the apps where you are actively building community at any time are taken from you or even just threatened or being threatened to be taken away from you, you know that you have other places where you’re also building community and where it won’t feel like you are starting at zero when it happens. Love you, mean it, always. If you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them.

I could consider doing a further deep dive if you’d like. Leave those questions down in the comments if you have them. If you have any other tips or ideas that you want to share in the comments, I would love to hear those. I would love to hear your thoughts on Loomly and what you’ve just seen. So make sure you share all those in the comments below. Love ya, mean it, always. I’ll see you in the next one.