aka: Our Fall Drop of Cool New Stuff for you, ägile Marketers!
So, dear agile marketers,
the moment has come again in which we uncover
what we have been working on behind the scenes here
to hand over to you a generous package of additions, tweaks, and yes, also stability enhancements.
So, what we here is to differentiate into two main areas….
The big stones vs. the cobbles
You probably know the story about the professor who taught the kids how to prioritize their lives.
The main lesson is:
Put in the big stones first, because if not, all the sand and pebbles in it will leave no space for it.
It’s excellent advice for life – so why should we not take it to heart for software development? We like to do things here our own way anyway, hopefully in a clever way. 😉 Looking at software development processes as we found them, we saw too often that lots of pebbles were added to the software we had been using ourselves—but did that really add to the bigger picture?
Or was it just a list of tiny stuff?
Or worse: Just a pile up of more features and
STUFF!?
So, for Ägile Ässets, we decided to apply this principle, plus the idea of a seasonal collection release (think fashion, marketing campaigns…), to our software releases.
Let others use only numbers for their versioning—we’re here for the (creative, brand-building) fun!
So, we have some fantastic “big stones” for this release.
The first one came as a no-brainer for several reasons.
Big Stone #1: New channel for auto-posting: Pinterest
- Reason #1: Soooo many of you asked for it 😅
- Reason #2: I had seen up front at Pinterest’s presence in Cannes at the Festival of Creativity and Innovation in June what an amazing job these guys are doing for marketers (customer-oriented, quite the contrary to some other platforms who seem to give a sh**).
- Reason #3: Overall, social media has become so much more part of the sales funnel, and Pinterest seems to have created themselves a special place in that game.
Let’s zoom in there for a moment:
The special place Pinterest has carved out for themselves in the Social Media Landscape
Strength #1 of Pinterest in 2024: Its quality audience.
Interestingly enough, even though at first sight one might mix up Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest because all these platforms are so visual-heavy, they are well differentiated through the audience they attract.
The Pinterest audience – mainly over the years of the Pandemic – has shifted into a microcosm for DIY, creativity, the makers, and the nice things in life.
This, in turn, means much less hate speech problems or simply a more pleasant party to go to, as well as more harmony on the playground, leading to higher trust for links leading on.
Which gets us to part 2:
Strength #2 of Pinterest in 2024: SEO Power for Grown-Ups
We would have to look into facts a bit more. Still, the story goes that due to the SEO-related changes in Google’s overall system, the search and leading organic traffic via Google has become extremely hard. Looking for alternative ways to get the right kind of eyes on your content and products, lots of you have experimented and found Pinterest to give you great leverage for your efforts. Plus – as mentioned in #1 – if your product/offering fits the audience, it will provide you with a much better quality of leads. TikTok has become pretty obvious to have become a big search engine/place for discovery, but still, the audience there might simply not be a good fit for your more grown-up brand.
In cases like this, if you don’t have it on your agenda yet, Pinterest will be an excellent new addition to look into.
What can you do with the new Pinterest connection?
- First, to set it up, go to your settings, ensure you are logged in with the right account, and then connect.
- You can add ‘normal’ = static pins and video pins to Ägile Ässets
- and when you want to post them, you choose the board, the time, that’s it.
- As always, should something not work out, you and I will receive an email indicating something is up. Should something come up other than that, y’all know how to reach us. 🙂
So, happy Pinteresting to you all!
If you have interesting stats or success stories to share, please feel free to do so. We’d be happy to publish a benchmark report or something similar so you all profit from the insights.
Big Stone #2: Go (creatively) wild with the new in-depth Canva integration
We KNOW how much you all love the Canva integration already. There is more goodness to that: This was just the beginning!
So far, the integration has been super stable and pretty straightforward. It primarily allowed you to import static files of the usual post sizes, such as Instagram feed posts, etc.
The new in-depth Canva integration (spoiler: so cool! it goes much deeper!)
now allows you to view and select all relevant files and sizes
and also (hold your horses!)
to bulk import directly.
Saving even more time and effort in between the creative and the strategic / scheduling processes in social media management
It is live now. Try it out, have fun, let us know what you think.
and btw – even the canva team gave us some lovely feedback about it:
“Lovely site and elegant integration.”
Check it out on YouTube now:
The fancyness will continue…
We’re not the ones to stop short of any given process optimization that makes sense for your brand-building on social media. So, we have put it on our list to make brand templates directly available. Yoyoyo!
Expect this to drop this year, definitely before XMas, maybe sooner.
Ok, that is pretty good already in terms of new features for your agile social media management, right?
I am proud to say there is more!
Big Stone #3: Capture your best ideas on the go, send them via email to become post-drafts in your Ägile Ässets
So, some of you might have noticed on Linkedin that I have travelling quite a lot this year… making valuable connections with some of you, but also on the hunt for investment (we skipped that by the way and focus on getting it done the good ol’ bootstrapped way #energygoeswhereperceptionflows), and overall learning what is really important.
While I DO love travelling per se, the whole theory vs. practice of whether and how you can REALLY use WiFi on airplanes etc. – well, let’s just say, it is still more a vision than a fact.
You creative folks, we all know when and where we will have those brilliant ideas….
It is either here:
under the shower
or on a walk
well, close 😉
or on the airplane waiting for take off after the stewardess has asked to go on airplane mode
but basically:
When we are
OFFLINE!
Of course, we do!
It drove me and the team crazy that I would end up with some weird notes on my WhatsApp (quite verbatim: “note to self”), then forgetting about it, and: where was that pic that should go with it? *headsratch*.
You get the idea.
We considered an app version, but honestly, would it solve the problem? Not really.
Let’s keep it straightforward – and agile.
That is why we have set up a simple yet effective way for you to capture post ideas.
All of you will receive a dedicated individual Ägile Ässets connect email address.
To this address, you can send emails containing the caption/topic ideas (as the email’s main text) and pictures (as attachments) and then have them appear in your Ägile Ässets as drafts.
Simply capture those ideas in your email client/tool, have them sent once you’re online again, and have your team / yourself refine them later once you’re on your dashboard again.
Hint: For these offline /online sending purposes, Thunderbird is just great.
Creativity just rules! And in Ägile Ässets: Always!
Let us also share about the pebbles we took care of.
Pebble #1: Mägic Ed Tech Base: Upgrade AI model to the latest GPT-o version
So far, the GPT-4 model has been used. In relation, it has become not only expensive but slow, plus it has gotten older due to new releases.
We now use GPT-4-o which is a much more qualitative trained model meaning: Whenever you use Mägic Ed, it will give you quicker and better quality results.
Pebble #2: Show upload indicator with all the details of currently uploaded media
So far, when you uploaded media, there was no indicator of what was actualy happening. Some tools will for example tell you that they will notify you once your file is uploaded. As this did not exist, somehow, the expectation was for uploads to happen basically within the wink of an eye 😉 which, even in 2024, is not realistic (check out for example, how long canva downloads need). We figured it might help to provide more clarity here.
Now, for every upload, you will get a quick feedback about file size, transfer speed, and time left until completion. This has already been active for some weeks – and indeed, since then, no one was worried about upload times anymore.
Pebble #3: Video Posts: Add /edit video cover pics for post creation and auto-publishing
While some social media platforms will just use the first frame of any video you post, this was neither reliable nor customizable. Our auto video cover capture from the video was, therefore, not satisfactory for those fo you who wanted to add their own cover photos. It was simply not “on par” with good brand building and, therefore, a priority for us to get it fixed.
You can now simply choose the cover picture to be used reliably and ensure that your overall brand story is visually consistent throughout your feed.
Pebble #4: Linkedin Auto-Publish Enhancement: Tag organizations/companies in your posts
There was no way to mention organizations, so you had to tag them manually after posting. (By the way, yes, we know that there are tools that ‘allow’ tagging people, too. Please be informed that this does not comply with LinkedIn standards, and we have valid info that users have been blocked from LinkedIn for using such tools/practices.)
It is important to note that according to LinkedIn’s policies, the tagging for auto-publishing via API is only available for organizations, NOT personal profiles. There have been apps that tried to work around that, and we have proof here that these practices have been restricted by something pretty uncomfortable—LinkedIn restricted their accounts (we don’t want to add to the harm done here, so won’t publish it, if you’d like the details, please reach out to us).
Even though tempting, we would never recommend or build in anything that might put your online reputation at risk and highly recommend staying away from any ‘easy fix’.
Having said that, please enjoy the
new process enhancement for LinkedIn Auto-Publishing: Mentioning Organizations
Ägile Ässets now enables users to search for organizations using the company’s username, and it can be easily added to the caption to facilitate professional use of social media platforms such as LinkedIn.
Pebble #5: Prevent Facebook token expires to clog the calendar [based on input from user Duane]
Duane reported that her calendar was not loading; when we investigated in detail, we found that the error was caused by the meta token expiring while trying to fetch the social media post link. Thanks for making us aware and cooperating on this with us, Duane! ✨ 🙏
After troubleshooting, the meta links are only requested if the token has not expired. Duane’s problem has gone.
#6 Better email deliverability for notification emails
Notification emails are an essential part of our resilience system—should a post not be posted, you and we will receive a notification email. However, some of those notification emails went to your junk folders instead, not allowing you to notice those heads-ups.
We now made sure the email routing has all the necessary tags, so you should receive them 99% of the time. In most cases, it will be a notification about expired tokens, meaning you simply have to refresh the channel connection.
This long list might also give you a good idea of why we are not so keen on sharing forecasting roadmaps.
We much rather give you a heads-up once something is done. It might be the German in me or the fact that we would rather overdeliver than underpromise. It has worked well so far, and we’ll stick with it for now.
Besides those, there are LOTS of housekeeping and automation for housekeeping (think: cleaning robot 😉 or in the analogy of stones and pebbles, the sand)). There is no need to bore you with the tech details so that you know it’s taken care of.
On to the more fun and creative side of this release, we got lots of goodies for you!
We got:
- a fun playlist on Spotify for you
- as well as content ideas
- and a moodboard with creative inspo
- and creative triggers for your work.
We’ll add them here and on our social media channels throughout the next 2-3 weeks.
This leaves the question:
For all that massive goodness, which Ägile Ässets plans will profit from it?
Let me make this simple on everyone:
Yes, we’ll add it to ALL of them.
Enjoy!
Brand Builder Tip of the Month: Never ever overdo it.
We rarely need to actively restrict one of our dear users’ usage of the platforms. However, it happened, and the reason was: (Can you guess what it was?) Overposting.
When you build a quality brand (and this is what Ägile Ässets is focused on helping you with), it is ok to use a productive redundancy in your messaging; that is true and within the overload of the web even needed. However, it will never ever be helpful to spam a platform with your own or your client’s content. It will inevitably end in them blocking the account used and the brand losing trust. And if you consider it:
Trust is the ultimate currency, it translates into revenue and sales – or not.
While sometimes the temptation of allegedly quick results may wink at you, still, be clever and do not give in. (We have just seen bad examples of that on LinkedIn with such quick-win results.) Build with quality, always keep your audience in mind, and you will be fine.
Keeping brand and company value in mind as the front and centre goal, we will always support the development of quality techniques, not spammy practices of any kind.
[Pic: My own, taken in Cannes, this June]
Is social media management your (agency) business?
In this case, you might want to check out the agency packages that come with a ‘god mode’ (you vs. the client spaces), and this is the area where we will build the next big stones (well, we’re actually already on it):
- for one, we will soon put live a super neat release process for you and your clients
- as well as a white-label version, which means that you can be an agile social media management star for your clients.
These packages are perfect if you want dedicated client spaces, more space, and variations. Check out the details on the packages page and /or feel free to contact us directly.
