The Gain Blog

We’re excited to tell you about some great new features and improvements we’ve made to Gain. Customers have been asking for these for some time and we’re glad to release them today for you to play with.

A More Streamlined Post Editor

The WYSIWYG Facebook Post Editor gets a new look that’s more attractive and space-saving. The post previews are still front and center, but the scheduling and targeting options are more compact. We’ve also made the approval status section more prominent, so you can always see at a glance if the client has approved your post or has asked for revisions.

A Better Approvals Experience for your Clients

Speaking of client approvals, we’ve made the approvals process better. If you’ve used Gain in the past you know that you can already send content directly to your clients, and they can either approve or request revisions just by clicking a link on an email message—no login required. Now we’ve enhanced this experience. Some highlights:

• Mobile-friendly approval area. Now your clients can see and approve content on the go, right from their phone.
• Full content calendar available to approvers. Now your clients can see a complete timeline of all posts that will be published on their Facebook page in the upcoming weeks.
• A better desktop experience as well. On a desktop computer, your clients can now see full-size post previews, exactly how they’ll look once they’re published.

A Notification Center for You

Finally, we’re introducing a brand new notification center to let you keep track of client approvals and request for revisions. You’ll never miss a client request again.

All these new features are available today so be sure to try them out. And if you haven’t checked out Gain yet, remember, you can try it out for free right now, no credit card required.

Today Facebook Page administrators woke up to find they don’t have the ability to attach a custom image when sharing a link.

Facebook removed this feature, which gave Page admins full control of the look and feel of link posts. Content creators must now choose between the set of thumbnails Facebook fetches from the linked page.

Link posts are the recommended and best-performing way to drive traffic to a website outside of Facebook, but this change now makes them less attractive. What to do?

Gain to the Rescue

Fortunately, the ability to add your own images to link posts is available in Gain’s world-class post editor, the best way to see exactly how your Facebook post will look before you publish it. Gain’s post editor gives you full image control for both photo and link posts. Import images from anywhere (your computer, Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, integrated web image search) and edit them in place (crop, enhance, add text and filters).

Watch the video to see it in action:

(Watch it on Youtube)

And of course, you get all the other great Gain features like the social media calendar, approvals, and collaboration. Try Gain now for free with no credit card required.

A couple of days ago a major vulnerability was found in OpenSSL, a third-party server component that provides secure access to many internet services such as ours. This vulnerability, called Heartbleed, affected many web services you use every day.

When the vulnerability was announced we immediately responded and secured all Gain services. We are no longer vulnerable to Heartbleed.

There is absolutely no evidence that any Gain customers’ personal data was compromised in any way. It is still a good idea, however, to change your password on Gain and on any other website that may have been affected. You can reset your Gain password here.

We shall continue to monitor this and any other future threats, and will respond quickly. If you have any question regarding this issue please contact us at contact@gainapp.com. 

Social media calendars out there suck. Most people just download a spreadsheet template or Google Doc from the web and just manage it there. So, what’s wrong with that? Everything.

Let me try to list all the reasons why managing a social media calendar on a spreadsheet is wrong.

Mistakes.

Managing a spreadsheet basically means that you are constantly importing and exporting content from other places to manage it. We come from an agency background and we’ve seen plenty of simple but frequent mistakes caused by a sloppy copy and paste job. Why chance it?

No History.

Passing around spreadsheets via email makes it almost impossible to keep track of who has the last version of the document. Even making sure that you have the latest version on your computer means dedicating a good portion of your time to develop your own mini-system to maintain all versions of your files so that there are no mistakes.

Time wasted.

This one is a biggie as people inside agencies waste time managing social media content for clients in several areas;

• Account management - Time wasted emailing back and forward spreadsheets inside the agency and with the client.
• Social Media Managers - Time spent creating content on spreadsheets that will need to be re-created and scheduled on a social media platform once again when it’s approved.
• Art Director - Fulfilling requests for images for the social media manager and sometimes creating mockups of how the content will look to users once is posted so that the client can see for himself.
• Client - Sorting and viewing social media content on a spreadsheet is time consuming and frustrating, especially when the client is not being able to take any easy action to leave feedback or approve the content on their mobile.

Emails

Everyone hates emails. It really is not an efficient way to manage the collaboration around the content that your agency is creating as any notes or feedback given to you do not have the context required to make it easy to get to the point.

Lack of Previews

Clients prefer to see what their content will look like before is published and spreadsheets do not allow this. It only offers them a blob of text and and maybe a tiny thumbnail of the proposed image. Watching a full size image with it’s text in place will have ands impact that will not only help the client appreciate your hard work better, but also makes you look great!

Gain to The Rescue!

Agencies unnecessarily spend hundreds of man-hours on this process every month. This process creates aggravation inside the teams and with the client. Gain changes that.

Our process is simple, once you create a piece of content on our platform it lives there until it’s scheduled, approved and published on Facebook. There’s absolutely no copy/pasting and every user, including the client will always see the content exactly as it will be seen on Facebook.

Gain will pay for itself from day one and will bring efficiency immediately to your team. Try Gain for free right now for 14 days with no credit card needed!

Photo by Keith Williamson

So you manage a Facebook page, and since late last year the engagement rates for Pages have been dropping like flies. You create great content but your engagement keeps falling and, worse yet, getting people to click on your links is almost impossible. What in the world are you supposed to do? 

There’s really no way of cheating the system so you are left with two options: 1) pay up, or 2) create awesome, engaging content that people actually like. If people you reach already like your content and you don’t want to pay to gain more of them, what then?

Let’s talk about the 5 most important things that you must do to make a Facebook post that people like and want to share.

1. Be Clear and Concise

Your posts should be short and sweet. Most people look forward to the next great thing as they scan their feed. Make it easy for them to like your content by making it clear what it is that you want them to know or do. Stop the verbose marketing speak, posts are not a brochure.

2. Don’t Post Fillers

If you’re creating content for business or a client sometimes you want to make sure that you fill up the calendar. You want to ensure that there’s not a single space without content because lord knows what’ll happen if your followers don’t hear from you every morning at exactly 8:30am!

Some say that if you have nothing to say don’t say anything at all. I disagree. In social, if you have nothing to say then you are not working hard enough to have something to say. Creating social content is as creative as any other form of advertising and filler sometimes comes from the inability of the page manager to “come up” with great ideas. 

Pro Tip: If you are an agency take advantage of your creative talent. Agencies tent to segregate “creatives” from the “social media” people and this is the opposite of what you want to create awesome, engaging content. Creatives need to be part of the process and social media folks need to start using them to their advantage to avoid the post stagnation.

3. Keep it Straight

Don’t trick users. Users are not stupid and they’ll hate you when they figure out that you’re trying to trick them, and they’ll tell their friends. If you think you’re being clever, well you’re not. We all have our little marketing tricks but if you need tricks to make your strategy work, you’re doing it wrong.

4. Post the Best Content by Using Simple Metrics

There’s a ton of tools out there that will give you analytics where you can slice and dice the data in every which way. Sometimes social media folks get tangled up on the complexity of all the data and forget that there are some very simple metrics to figure out what content really works for your audience. 

Nail the basics first, so go back and look at the direct impact that each post had on your audience. The basic post interactions (likes, comments, and shares) are the best indicators of how the post did. Each user interaction has a different value to any social strategy. For example, a Like is not as “valuable” as a Comment. A Comment means that the user cared enough to have interacted with the post by writing something on it. A share is even more valuable as it is an explicit action from a user screaming “Guys take a look at this!”

We can assign a weight to each interaction based on how valuable it is. We then divide all these weighted interactions by the number of people who saw the post (also called the reach).

The formula would look something like this where each interaction has a different multiplier value based on their importance:

Once we put some actual numbers like the example below you are able to get a number that you can use to compare a post with any other. We typically multiply the number x1000 to make it easier to compare across all other posts.

We use a similar formula on Gain (called the Gain Score) to calculate and provide you the engagement of each post right on the dashboard so you don’t have to do the math.

5. Make it Look Nice

Don’t be sloppy. Take full advantage of the space Facebook provides:

• Shorten the URL - Not only is it good practice as it looks better when posted, free services like bit.ly also give you details on how many people clicked your link, where they came from, who shared it, how many times, etc. There’s no excuse to not shorten your URL’s before posting them on Facebook.

• Hide The URL - Make it clear to the user what you expect her to do. If you post your link using a text or photo post then you have no choice but to leave the URL visible to the user as it’s the only place where the user can take action. However, if you’re using a Link Post, as you should (see next bullet!) then you want to make sure that the URL is no longer part of the post text area as the user can click in the link image, title, and description below the text. 

• Use Link Posts - If your Facebook strategy leads users off of Facebook to your site or other places ALWAYS use link posts. It used to be the case that you always wanted to use a photo post even when the expected action by the user was to click on a link on the post to go somewhere off of Facebook. Well, after the recent changes to Facebook’s EdgeRank (the technology that determines what content each one of us sees when we log into Facebook) it’s clear that using photo posts to get users to click on a link will not work as well anymore. Link posts now contains images that are huge and if used correctly they can be extremely compelling to users. It’s actually the closest thing to a traditional ad banner inside Facebook as the whole image and the link title and description below it are actually clickable.

• Use The Right Image Size - Facebook’s recent News Feed design change now means that images do not get scaled or cropped to fill all the available space on the post like before, many times leaving wasted space on the right that’s left unused. This means that you must crop images correctly to ensure that you maximize your images. Last week we published an infographic on how to maximize the use of images for the new News Feed design. Check it out here.

We built Gain to make it easier for social media managers and agencies to manage the content they create for social media, from content creation to managing the content calendar to managing your client approvals. Go ahead and try it for free with no credit card needed.

Photo: Thomas Angerman

With just one click you can now quickly share any page or article that you visit without ever needing to cut and paste the URL. Just drag the new Gain Bookmarklet to the bookmark bar of your browser and you can start sharing content to any of the pages that you manage.

Just like all link posts created on Gain, once you share with the new bookmarklet, we will automatically detect the link that you shared on your post and Gain will pull images, title, and description of the page and you are free to edit the post just like you normally will before posting.

To get your bookmarklet just visit the “Sharing Tools” section of your account and drag the button to your bookmark bar.

Install it today to make sharing content even easier!

Don’t use Gain yet? You can try it free today with no credit card needed.

If you create social content for your business or for clients, then you probably have felt all the little annoyances that come with the creation of content for Facebook. For example, that photo that your client selected doesn’t look that great and the aspect ratio is all wrong. So now you have to either edit it yourself using Photoshop or get your Art Director to find the time to give you a hand. Why couldn’t it be more simple?

It’s hard to keep track of all the text character restrictions, the multiple image size options, aspect ratios, and post type options to choose from. As ex-agency folks we’ve been there, and our frustrations brought us to create what we believe is the best post editor for Facebook. 

We’ve removed those little annoyances that are making us all crazy and less efficient.

Content Creation 

We wanted to make content creation easy, so we used a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) approach. With Gain you’ll see a preview of how the content is going to be seen by users right as you type, so there’s no more guessing. This also means that when approving, your clients will always see exactly how the content is going to look, both on desktop and mobile devices, before it’s ever published. Never be surprised that the picture got cropped in the wrong place or the text got cut off before the end of your sentence.

Image Importing

Images bring your content to a whole new level of engagement and we let you completely customize the images of both photo and link posts, so you have complete control of how that post will look like. We also make it easy to get the pictures from where you have them (be your desktop, a Facebook album, Google Drive, Dropbox, or even an FTP server), pulling them straight into our app. We even provide you with web image search to help you create basic content mockups that can be used to present ideas, or as placeholders for the content calendar.

Image Editing

Every social network’s content looks different depending on what type of content it is. For example, a picture to be used on a Facebook Image Post has a different aspect ratio than the picture that you would use on a Link Post. We include a built-in image editor that not only provides basic image manipulation functions, but also the ability to add custom “Instagram” style filters, and even add text, right from our editor. This means no more opening Photoshop on your computer, or having to request the help of an Art Director.

Content Previewing and Client Approvals

Finally, you can say good bye to mocking up your content or creating it on Facebook just to take screenshots to show your client. Because all content you create looks just like it will when published, you can send these previews straight from Gain to your client via email for approval. And the client doesn’t even need an account on Gain.

Content creation is just one of the ways Gain makes content management easier. If you want to learn more you can also check out how we tackled managing the social media calendar.

Try us today for 14 days for free. No credit card needed. We know you’ll love it and your clients will love you more for it!

Most social media content strategies revolve around a calendar to ensure that the topics are aligned with the overall messaging of the brand or institution. Unfortunately, the tools that exist today are primitive and somewhat rudimentary (spreadsheets, really?). Yet most organizations are stuck with them as there has not been a true, easy, solution for creating, organizing, and publishing your social media content around a calendar.

Building a Better Calendar

At Gain we’ve taken all our knowledge around managing content for clients and built a tool that transforms (in a good way!) the way an organization manages their social media content around a calendar.

We want to share how Gain helps streamline your workflow in the following areas:

• Scheduling/Calendar - Goodbye spreadsheets! We help you organize your content in an easy and good-looking weekly timeline view that shows a pixel-perfect preview of every piece of content at a glance. It lets you filter between drafts, unapproved, approved, and scheduled content. You can easily move from week to week to see your upcoming content. 
• Content Approvals - Sometimes team members or clients need to approve some of the content before it gets published. We want to make sure you can gather feedback and get approvals from the stakeholders in an streamlined way. With a couple of clicks, you share the calendar content for clients to see, approve or comment and they don’t even need an account on Gain, a simple click on their email does the trick. Did we mention that you won’t need spreadsheets anymore?
• Content Publishing - Traditionally, once approved, the process to upload all the content to be scheduled begins. In Gain, once the content is approved, it is ready to go to the social network. Eliminating the spreadsheet out of the approval process means that once a client gives you the go-ahead on the content in your calendar, it can be published with just a couple of clicks. 

We have built a much better calendar. An that is just one of the features that make Gain the most efficient way for any agency or social media manager to manage their social marketing content workflow. 

Try us today for 14 days for free. No credit card needed. We think you’ll love it. Your clients will love you more for it too.

Image provided by Placeit.net

Right on the heels of Facebook’s new newsfeed and pages redesign, we are updating all our user’s content editors with a new simplified look and feel. 

We want to ensure that content created for Facebook pages on Gain looks exactly how a user will see it on their Facebook’s newsfeed. It is important that an agency’s creative team can ensure that the content they created represents the brand intention and that clients can approve it knowing that it will be exactly how consumers will see it on their feed. Basically approving your social media content just like print!

We are rolling out the new look tonight and should be available tomorrow, March 12, ready to use for all our clients, including the users of Gain Pro.

Feel free to contact us at contact@gainapp.com if you have questions on this change.

And if you haven’t used Gain yet then try us out right now!