One of our most popular feature requests has been the ability to assign tasks to team members and manage the approval workflow from within Send Social Media. We’re excited to announce that this feature is now available on all of our multi-user plans! Team administrators can now specify exactly which user needs to approve content before it gets published. Learn how Team Members can approve content before it gets published with Send Social Media:

To configure a workflow for a user, follow the steps below:
1. If you haven’t already done so, sign up for a Send Social Media account that allows you to manage multiple users/clients.
2. Go to My Users and either create a new user or edit an existing one.
3.  You will now see an Approval Worfklow section. Click edit to define who this user needs approval from before they can publish content.

4. Follow the steps to Save or Create the user.
5. Now, when this user creates their content from the Message Box, they will see a Submit For Approval button.
6. The user has the ability to add a message/comment that will be sent to the user from whom they require approval. This user will receive a notification, informing them that they need to either approve or reject the content.

We are excited to announce the launch of several new features ideal for franchise businesses wanting to leverage the power of social media across all of their locations. When developing these new features, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for large chains to manage social media for each of their stores.  Learn how Franchisors can manage Multiple Locations with Send Social Media:

1. How to write the same post once and insert custom content for each location

Send Social Media now makes it possible for users to define custom tags that can be assigned at a store/location level or at a social media account level. These custom tags act as placeholders at the time messages/posts are composed and are replaced with actual values at the time the message is actually sent. To define custom merge tags for social media accounts, follow the steps below…

a) Sign into your Send Social Media  account and click on My Users.
b) Click “Tags”
c) Create a new custom field/merge tag, by clicking New Field.
d) A new dialog will open up and you’ll be able to enter custom capture information.
e) Select the Category – this is the type of merge tag you will be creating. Options are “Contact”, “User” or “Account” and dictate where these merge tags can be used. For this example, use “Account”.
f) Click Save to add your first merge tag. To add more, repeat the process from c above.

e) Now that you’ve added a few custom tags, you can populate the fields. Since we’ve added Account tags, we can add tags at the account level.
f) To do this, go to Add/Edit Services > My Services. For each of your social network accounts, click the “Tag” button and fill in the relevant information.

g) Now that you’ve added information for each account, you can compose a message and insert merge tags to be replaced with the relevant content at the time your message is sent.
h) Go to the Message Box tab and click “Merge Tags”. You’ll see a dialog window with multiple tags, grouped by category.

i) You can insert tags into your message by clicking on the relevant item from the list.
j) When you’re ready, you can select as many social media services as you like and the merge tags will be replaced with the appropriate content at the time of sending.

2. How to sign off content at the head office before a location publishes content

Head office is often required to approve content before it gets published to a franchise’s social network accounts. Send Social Media’s workflow features make it possible for you to define approval workflows, assign tasks and make sure content is approved and signed off before it gets published to the social web. To create a workflow, follow the steps below:

a) Go to My Users.
b) Click on the user/location in your list who needs approval before content can be published.

c) Under “Approval Workflow”, click “Edit” to be able to define which user needs to approve posts before they get published.

3. How can head office publish content on behalf of a location

Send Social Media’s powerful social media dashboard makes it possible for usrs to share their social network accounts with other users. In the franchise scenario, the head office has the ability to create each of their locations, setup each of their social network profiles and then share these accounts with team members who need to be able to publish to these accounts. The way to set this up using Send Social Media  is as follows:

a) After creating your location instances within My Users, switch to each location’s account and setup their social media profiles for them.
b) Once you’ve done this, go to Add/Edit Services > My Services and use the Sharing button to share these services with the head office user.
c) This will allow head office to post updates on behalf of the location from within their Message Box.

4. How can head office access reports across all of their stores/locations

Send Social Media’s social media analytics features provide you with aggregated reports across each of the franchise’s locations. To access printable reports for individual locations or across the entire franchise, you can do this as follows:

a) Go to My Users.
b) Click the Reports button.
c) You’ll see a new dialog window that you can use to print reports.

Send Social Media makes it easy to import and schedule multiple social media updates at once. The type of message you choose to import could be anything like your regular Tweets or your daily Facebook status updates.

A CSV file is a simple text format commonly used for database tables. Each record in a table is one line of text with each value separated by a comma with no space. Learn how to schedule Multiple Social Media Updates in bulk with Send Social Media:

Note: While most text editors, office applications, and database management systems support CSV format, they may not export correct character renderings in a CSV. For instance, depending on a system’s regional settings, Microsoft Excel may use a semicolon as a separator instead of a comma. Be sure to check your application’s defaults before exporting to CSV format. Be sure to use the following date format for the SendDate column: yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm. E.g. 2012-02-24 23:59 for your CSV file.

You can follow the steps below to import the messages using Send Social Media’s message importer:

1) Click on Add/Edit Services > Import.

2) Under CSV importers, click “Add” next to Message Importer.

3) Click “Browse” and select your CSV file.

4) Note that Send Social Media accepts a specific CSV file format as seen below. The column headers “Message”, “Subject” and “SendDate” must be included.

5) Select the group that you want these messages to be distributed to. A group can consist of multiple social network profiles, email address, blogs etc.

One of our most popular new features on Send Social Media, is the ability to resell and offer your own version of our social media marketing platform to your clients.

With our white label social media tool, you have the option to manage social media on behalf of your clients, or train them up and allow them to log in themselves and manage their own social media accounts.  Send Social Media is a great tool to help implement a social media strategy for your customers. Why Send Social Media is the perfect Social Media Management Tool for Agencies:

The way the white label site works is as follows:

• We create and host a completely re-branded site for your business/agency – with your own logo, look-and-feel – running on your own website domain, but hosted on our servers.
• We give you a control panel where you can administer your site. From here, you can manage your existing clients and create new logins for your clients.
• Your clients can log in to your white label site themselves and view reports, send social media posts, track mentions etc – or you have the option to manage things for them from your control panel.
• There is a one-off setup fee for the white-label site which includes re-branding and indefinite hosting on our servers.

For more information be sure to contact us

Social Media Motivational Thought of the day!

We are excited to announce the launch of several new features ideal for franchise businesses wanting to leverage the power of social media across all of their locations. When developing these new features, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for large chains to manage social media for each of their stores.  Learn how Franchisors can manage Multiple Locations with Send Social Media:

1. How to write the same post once and insert custom content for each location

Send Social Media now makes it possible for users to define custom tags that can be assigned at a store/location level or at a social media account level. These custom tags act as placeholders at the time messages/posts are composed and are replaced with actual values at the time the message is actually sent. To define custom merge tags for social media accounts, follow the steps below…

a) Sign into your Send Social Media  account and click on My Users.
b) Click “Tags”
c) Create a new custom field/merge tag, by clicking New Field.
d) A new dialog will open up and you’ll be able to enter custom capture information.
e) Select the Category – this is the type of merge tag you will be creating. Options are “Contact”, “User” or “Account” and dictate where these merge tags can be used. For this example, use “Account”.
f) Click Save to add your first merge tag. To add more, repeat the process from c above.

e) Now that you’ve added a few custom tags, you can populate the fields. Since we’ve added Account tags, we can add tags at the account level.
f) To do this, go to Add/Edit Services > My Services. For each of your social network accounts, click the “Tag” button and fill in the relevant information.

g) Now that you’ve added information for each account, you can compose a message and insert merge tags to be replaced with the relevant content at the time your message is sent.
h) Go to the Message Box tab and click “Merge Tags”. You’ll see a dialog window with multiple tags, grouped by category.

i) You can insert tags into your message by clicking on the relevant item from the list.
j) When you’re ready, you can select as many social media services as you like and the merge tags will be replaced with the appropriate content at the time of sending.

2. How to sign off content at the head office before a location publishes content

Head office is often required to approve content before it gets published to a franchise’s social network accounts. Send Social Media’s workflow features make it possible for you to define approval workflows, assign tasks and make sure content is approved and signed off before it gets published to the social web. To create a workflow, follow the steps below:

a) Go to My Users.
b) Click on the user/location in your list who needs approval before content can be published.

c) Under “Approval Workflow”, click “Edit” to be able to define which user needs to approve posts before they get published.

3. How can head office publish content on behalf of a location

Send Social Media’s powerful social media dashboard makes it possible for usrs to share their social network accounts with other users. In the franchise scenario, the head office has the ability to create each of their locations, setup each of their social network profiles and then share these accounts with team members who need to be able to publish to these accounts. The way to set this up using Send Social Media  is as follows:

a) After creating your location instances within My Users, switch to each location’s account and setup their social media profiles for them.
b) Once you’ve done this, go to Add/Edit Services > My Services and use the Sharing button to share these services with the head office user.
c) This will allow head office to post updates on behalf of the location from within their Message Box.

4. How can head office access reports across all of their stores/locations

Send Social Media’s social media analytics features provide you with aggregated reports across each of the franchise’s locations. To access printable reports for individual locations or across the entire franchise, you can do this as follows:

a) Go to My Users.
b) Click the Reports button.
c) You’ll see a new dialog window that you can use to print reports.

A new enhancement we’ve recently added to Send Social Media’s social media monitoring features is the ability to incorporate your Google alerts feed into the results.

Learn how to add a Google Alerts Feed into Send Social Media Monitoring:

1. In Send Social Media, go to “Add/Edit Services”
2. If no monitoring has been set up before, choose “Monitoring”, then “Brand Monitoring”, then “Add”
3. If monitoring has been set up before, toggle to “My Services” on left, and select “Monitoring” tab
4. Find the keyword monitoring you want to add Google Alerts to, and choose “Edit” on the far-right.
5. Now, in a separate browser window, login to your Google Alerts
6. Make sure that where it says “deliver to”, you change that to say “Google Reader”
7. Now, while pointing at/hovering over the orange RSS icon to the right of the words “Google Reader”, right-click, and select “copy link location” (note: don’t choose “copy image location” by mistake)
8. Click back to the Send Social Media browser window, and “paste” that link into the Google Alerts feed field.  The link should look like this:  http://www.alerts/feeds/##########, where # represents a bunch of numbers.
9. Now, click to the beginning of this feed address, and delete the http://, since Send Social Media already has this selected for you in the previous box.
10. Scroll to the bottom, and click “Save”

Social Media is critical to your organization’s success, especially going forward as more and more customer connections and engagement are moving there. With millions and millions of people spending more and more time on social sites, it only makes good business sense to be there with them. Just like any business decision, this should be thought out and not jumped into haphazardly. Here are 5 steps for successful social media monitoring with Send Social Media:

Know Your Plan
It is always important to know why and what you are going to do before you do it, otherwise you are being blown by the wind. Identifying which social networks best serve your interests and where your best chances are to make an impact on the public is a first step. Twitter and Facebook are givens, but you may find that SoundCloud is a great fit for you, or Pinterest. The more sites you can use effectively the better, but if you get no engagement from the site, move on. You also need to know what you want to accomplish there. Remember that throwing out links and ads left and right is not good social etiquette, you have to be real and engage.

Listen More, Talk Less
You must seek out your audience by monitoring sites for key words and phrases that relate to your mission. If they are mentioning your name, even better. If you are a company that sells patio grills and accessories, you might search sites for mentions of cooking, grilling, recipes, barbecues, or similar things. Once you find people talking about subjects that relate to what you do, you can follow or friend them and start engaging. Once you do engage, promote yourself, but don’t cram it down their throat. Just be friendly with them, and throw in what you can when it comes up.

Recruit Promoters
Once you are engaged, get your new friends to work for you by issuing campaign challenges, asking questions that people can answer and want to answer (these don’t have to be about your business), etc. You can then turn the conversation to something related to your business and attempt to get feedback. This builds the bond. The more you can create a give and take instead of just a give, the better the chance you can get your people to “like” you, retweet you, and generally become brand evangelists for you.

Social means Social
Again, don’t send out links about your latest promotion every hour. A social media site is exactly that, a place for conversations and casual engagement. If you try to convert your Facebook page to your sales floor, you will lose people quickly. There must be a great deal of tact employed with your engagement, finding the right balance between promotion and conversation. Try to think of it as hanging out with your friend and trying to get them to do something for you. You have to spend a lot more time buttering them up than throwing your sales pitch at them. If the relationship is built right, th rest comes easily.

Measure Success
There are simply too many people you will be exposed to to be able to track them by memory or with ticks on a page with a pencil. You will need a solid piece of social media management software to do the job right. The right dashboard gives you the numbers and analytics you need to effectively track how your engagement is increasing traffic and promoters. After all, it’s all about your ROI, and if you aren’t tracking that, then why are you doing it in the first place?

Twitter Hashtags are primarily used so that it’s easy to get a general pulse of groups of people who are talking about the same subject. By searching for a hashtag, you’ll be able to see a stream of all the tweets that include it. This can be extremely useful for both marketing and monitoring.

In terms of marketing, a hashtag is a great way to promote a special event. Choosing a hashtag for your event and then sharing it with others will allow them to create a buzz about your event before, during and after it occurs.

And for monitoring, a few simple Twitter searches can make it easy for you to see what hashtags are popular within your industry. You can then save those searches so you can keep an eye on any new topics that start gaining momentum. Send Social Media makes it easy to monitor conversations.

The other strategy you’ll definitely want to employ for optimizing your account is to start using Twitter Lists. The reason that lists are such a useful feature is because they allow you to create groups for both your own use and the use of others. Additionally, it’s a great way to get a pulse of what a specific segment of Twitter users are doing.

Creating a list is quite easy to do. Once you click the new list link that’s visible on your profile page when you’re logged in, you can choose whether you want it to be public or private. From there, you can either add the URLs of the Twitter users you want in the list, or you can navigate to their page and directly add them. You may also find that it’s quite useful to follow existing lists that other people have created.

Send Social Media allow you to automatically send a response to anyone who mentions your specific hashtags.  This is an excellent marketing tool for busy social media managers who don’t want to miss the chance to engage with a potential client.  By striking up a conversation automatically, this tool gives you the opportunity to truly engage with potential clients who are talking about your field of expertise. Follow these steps to configure the Twitter auto reply tool on your Send Social Media account.

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