Spredfast Blog

3 Reasons Facebook Is Bad For Business

Jul 29

Posted by spredfast in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

I only half mean it. Facebook isn’t all bad for business. Mark Zuckerberg and Co. do provide a platform to engage with 500 million people in a targeted way. Oh, and it’s free. Those are all good things.

But the devil is in the details, no? Why is it that Facebook can have such a robust platform in 2010 and still screw up so badly when it comes to providing the kinds of things that organizations and business need to reach people?

The reality is that organizations and business don’t have the time or the inclination to do all of their engagement directly in Facebook. There are other social networks out there that also matter. Hello, Twitter! So, organizations and business turn to social media management systems like Spredfast to make their engagement more efficient. This is where it breaks down for Facebook. Here are a few examples:

Posts via 3rd party applications do not have a share link

That’s right! Posts that come from 3rd party applications can not be shared in Facebook like posts that are made directly in Facebook. Not even the mighty Causes, which has more insider opportunities with Facebook than Martha Stewart had at ImClone, has managed to get a Share link to appear on posts made through their system. 

But why? The ability to share content within Facebook is one of the core tenants of the community, and there is no difference between the content being created directly in Facebook and that being created in a 3rd party application. It’s not like the companies have an opportunity to abuse anything by having a share link. It’s the person who reads the content  that decides to share it.

Updates from Pages made via 3rd Party applications cannot be targeted

Seems silly, right? The Facebook API provides a way to create and send the update, but it doesn’t provide a way to target the update. Why would you release an API method that only covers half of the functionality necessary to be useful? Unless Facebook wants companies to spam portions of a Page’s fan base with a message that doesn’t apply to them.

The ability to target the updates from Pages is extremely useful for anyone who administers a Page, because you can customize content for the specific segments of your audience, providing only valuable information.  Facebook would only be doing their members a service by allowing companies and organizations (which are allowed to have Pages, of course) to target updates.

Not all of the Insights for Pages data can be pulled through 3rd party applications

What Page administrator doesn’t want to know what is going on with their Page? The Insights feature is very cool and provides a ton of great data, but administrators using a 3rd party application to create content for their Page can not pull all of the Insights data out with that same 3rd party application because of the way Facebook has structured the Insights API. Forcing Page administrators to log into Facebook for certain activities while others to be done outside just seems inefficient. Provide a full service via the API or none at all.

Some may say that Facebook should make it easy for companies and organizations to engage with people inside the community because Facebook is a social network for people. To that I say, “That boat has already sailed!” Facebook opened the door to companies and non-profits when they created the Page. They’re in now, so Facebook should be doing everything it can to make it possible for companies and non-profits to interact in the same way that everybody else does. 

Social Media Initiative managed by Spredfast

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25 Things to Do and Not Do to Have a Stronger Facebook Presence

Jul 27

Posted by spredfast in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

The Altimter Group and Jeremiah Owyang published a great report on how to market using a Facebook Page. Spredfast was honored to be among the resources Jeremiah tapped to research that report. The link to the Altimeter presentation on Slideshare is provided at the bottom of this post. We hope you take time to read through the 25 Do’s and Dont’s that Spredfast preaches with our clients.

The Do’s:

On a Page

  1. Take advantage of the ability to create custom content on a tab using the static FBML application, and make this tab the default landing page to new visitors.
  2. On the Wall tab, make sure you show content from the Page and from Fans, and auto-expand comments, so it is clear to visitors that there is a level of engagement happening on the Page.
  3. Be very involved in the conversation happening on your Page.
  4. Update the content on the Page regularly with a mixture of original wall post content, wall post referrals to other pertinent content, video and photos. Try not to post to the wall more than 3 time per day.
  5. Allow fans to post video and photos to the Page. Reach out to those that do and thank them.
  6. Use Facebook Events to promote your real events, even if they require registration. Simply provide a link in the Facebook Event description to the event registration page and ask people to both register and “attend” in Facebook.
  7. If you have events where you can get Facebook fans to attend in person, get photos and videos, post them to Facebook and tag those Fans in the content.
  8. Find other, relevant Pages and add them to your Favorites. Usually, that Page will return the favor and hopefully drive more people to your Page.
  9. Advertise your Page on your other web properties and content streams, including the ability to become a fan and subscribe to updates via Text.
  10. Be sure to adopt o personal tone with your communications on the Page, even going so far as to identify the author in posts. Couple this with photos of the authors, so people can put a face with a name.
  11. Target Page Updates and Posts using the built in targeting functionality.
  12. Ask your Fans to suggest the Page to other people periodically.
  13. Frequently make the content about the Fans themselves by asking questions, posting Fan stories, and commenting on their activities.
  14. Find existing Pages centered on your brand and engage with them. Support them with content and information.
  15. Offer insider information that only Fans have access to.

On Profiles

  1. Be sure employees who are engaging in Facebook activities on behalf of the company have good, consistent company information, and that your social media policy is well understood by these folks.
  2. Prominently promote the company Page.
  3. Add contest and promotional applications to these profile for greater spread across Facebook. Be sure to include an invitation component to the app, but never require invitations to be sent in order to progress in the app.
  4. Offer insider information that only Friends have access to.

The Do Not’s:

  1. Don’t make the content on your Page or Profiles all about the company. Fans don’t want just another version of the website.
  2. Don’t disappear on your community. Engage daily.
  3. Don’t overpost so that your Page becomes a nuisance. 2 or 3 times per day maximum.
  4. Don’t overdo it with contest application. Be selective, and make the app a high quality experience.
  5. Don’t try to own all of your brand presence. Collaborate with those people who have started Pages and Groups around your brand.
  6. Don’t take it for granted. Monitor what is happening on your Pages and Profiles by using the data provided by Facebook or other sources (like Spredfast).

You can check out Jeremiah’s report here:

The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

Or read the Atimeter Group report in Slideshare. It is very good.

Social Media Initiative managed by Spredfast

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Austin’s Hyper-growth Social Media Company Spredfast is hiring Sales Directors

Jul 14

Posted by spredfast in Uncategorized | No Comments

Location: Austin, TX
Job Type: Full-Time, Salaried with Benefits and Incentive Compensation and Stock Options
Total Compensation: Based on experience & market conditions
Reports to: Sales Director

About this Position
Social Agency is looking for an extraordinarily talented individual(s) to join our sales team. You have to be the type of person that craves a challenge and is passionate about Social Media.  Social Agency is still a venture-backed startup so as a Sales Director you’ll play an incredibly important role in the growth of our company, with an opportunity to determine our future. The best people in early-stage companies usually end up serving in multiple roles over a brief period of time.

To be successful you’ll need to be passionate about our business, thrive in a flexible environment, and be very self-driven. This doesn’t mean we won’t be helping you sell – we will- but we believe strongly in hiring quality and talent, someone with confidence and the intelligence to execute like a business owner.

Skills and Qualifications
1. Build strong relationships with senior executives, including e-commerce and marketing executives
2. Demonstrate the value propositions of our product and services in onsite meetings, web demos and through written and oral communications
3. Manage a sales cycle from the initial meeting all the way through contracts, legal review and driving the signature process.
4. Be confident in selling a high value service of $60,000 plus

Job Requirements

  • Bachelors degree or Equivalent
  • 2+ years work experience minimum, preferably within Internet/e-commerce/Saas industries
  • Proficient in selling an early-stage product in a new industry (with a proven need) is a plus
  • 2+ years experience in business development and/or sales as a top-10% performer
  • Excellent communications and problem solving skills. Ability to make decisions in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.
  • Expert user of current web/online communication technologies, including browsers, search, email, instant messaging, and forums/message boards
  • Strong analytical and negotiation skills regarding technical and contractual aspects of partner relationships
  • Highly organized and detail oriented
  • Desire to constantly learn and process new information about our industry, solution, partners, and competitors
  • Extremely proactive with a strong bias for action.
  • A strong work ethic and desire to work in a fast-paced, fun, demanding environment.
  • Proficient with Salesforce and MS Office, MAC, PowerPoint and Excel
  • Open to 20% travel, fluctuating based on need Selling eCommerce-focused solutions

Company Overview

Social Agency’s Spredfast is a social media campaign management platform that allows organizations to manage, monitor, and measure their messages across multiple social media channels. Social media engagement offers opportunity to shape conversation, increase traffic, create relationships, and ultimately build sales.

To apply, submit your cover letter and resume to careers@socialagency.com.

Social Media Initiative managed by Spredfast

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Announcing Spredfast 1.5 – Like Spain, one of the best in the world

Jul 9

Posted by spredfast in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

It has been a busy few weeks for us here at Social Agency, building another crop of powerful new features designed to make you more effective at managing the social media presence of your company or organization. Once again, for those of you who don’t want to read all of the details, here are the highlights. Detailed descriptions follow.

Highlighted Features

  • Social profiles of people interacting with your communications
  • Ability to mark influential people
  • Integration with Gowalla
  • Categorize all of your communications with Content Labels
  • Set your personal Default Home Page
  • Audit trail extends beyond Inbox to Social Streams
  • Crimson Hexagon Integration

Improvements to Listening and Communicating

  • Broader ability to respond to people from the Social Streams and Inbox
  • Translate items in the Social Streams
  • See which responses you made were public and which were private
  • Create custom footers for blog posts

Improvements to Managing & Streamlining

  • Schedule and Assign responses from the Inbox and Social Streams

Improvements to Measuring & Reporting

  • Increased frequency of Conversation History updates
  • Add Facebook Page views to metrics

 

Social Profiles

Admit it. You want to know more about that person who retweeted your tweet and left a comment on your Facbook Page wall post. You want to know how many followers they have and how many friends. You want to know where they’re from and how they describe themselves. You want to know how engaged they are with your brand.

Now you can. Simply hover over or click the username of the person in the Inbox or in the Social Streams, and we’ll show you what is available to know about that person. We’ll show you their network size, their biography, location and count of engagement with your communications.

Mark Influencers

Along with social profile information, you can decide for yourself if the person interacting with your communications is an influencer. When you decide yes, you can mark that username and all engagement by that influential person will be easily identifiable. You can also export a data file on all of your influencers for inclusion in other systems like Salesforce.

Of course, you probably already have some influential people identified. You can import a list of usernames and we’ll automatically mark those people as influencers.

Like they say, it is about who you know. With Spredfast, it’s a lot easier to know who you should get to know.

Gowalla Integration

Location, location, location, right? You probably have locations that you would like to know more about. With our integration, you can see who is checking in and how often.

Content Labels

Would you like to be able to categorize your communications? Perhaps you want to separate your responses from your scheduled outbound communications. Or you want to group up all of your contest related content. Now you can with Content Labels. Each and every communication you create in Spredfast can be labeled, with as many labels as you like.

Soon, you’ll be able to filter all of the great metrics Spredfast captures by these Content Labels as well.

Default Home Page

Do you have a page in Spredfast that you always start with each and every time you log in? Would you like to land there upon log in automatically? Done. Just click the Default Home Page box on your favorite page and we’ll bring you there every time you log in.

Don’t worry, you can change it whenever you like. We’re flexible like that.

Expanded Audit Trail

We’ve always thought the audit trail in the Inbox was a great feature. You know, the one that lets you know when someone on your team has responded to an item, so you don’t mistakenly respond twice? Well, we’ve made it better. Now, the audit trail not only lets you know when someone has responded, but also when someone has been assigned to respond, or a response has been scheduled.

Oh, and we’ve extended the audit trail to the Social Streams as well, so now you can see which items are covered no matter where you come across them.

Crimson Hexagon Integration

Understanding the sentiment of the conversation about your company, organization, brand or mission is important. To that end, we’ve integrated Crimson Hexagon, one of the leading sentiment analysis systems, into Spredfast. Simply enter your Crimson Hexagon account credentials and you’ll be able to set up Crimson Hexagon Social Streams.

 

Like the Spanish National Soccer team, Spredfast 1.5has even more magic to offer. We’ve added more great improvements to the 3 main functions of our platform: Listening & Communicating, Measuring & Reporting, and Managing & Streamlining.

First up in the Listening & Engagement arena, we’ve made it easier to respond to engagement from your friends, followers, and fans by making sure the right response actions are available everywhere you want them to be.  We’ve also added a nifty translate feature so you can read those tweets from your rabid fan from China. In the Inbox and Conversation History, you can now see which communications were made publicly and which were made privately. Finally, you can now create your own custom footers for your blog posts. We know, you really love including branding for Spredfast at the bottom of each blog post, but we can’t ask you to do that every time. We appreciate what you’ve done so far.

In Managing & Streamlining, we’ve given you the ability to schedule and assign responses directly from the Social Stream. No more clicking 2 times to get there.

In Measuring & Reporting, we’ve reduced the time it takes for Spredfast to update the Conversation History. Now, you can respond to a mention you’ve come across in your Inbox, click the username of the person who mentioned you and see your entire conversation history with that person in just a matter of a few minutes. We’ve also added Facebook Page views to the Detailed Metrics table. As Facebook exposes more and more data from Page Insights, we’ll continue to pull it into Spredfast.

We hope you like what you’ve read about here and you jump in and try out the new features. We’re working hard on the next release, dreaming up cool ways for you the be a social media hero at your office.

We recognize that not everyone knows Spredfast as well as we do, so if any of the descriptions above don’t make sense to you, please feel free to reach out to use. We love our product and we love talking with people, so we’ll be happy to answer any questions or explain any feature in more detail. Here’s how you can reach us:

Twitter: @spredfast or @socialagency

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Austin-TX/Social-Agency-Inc

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/companies/306252/

Email: ken@socialagency.com , scott@socialagency.com , or james@socialagency.com

Web: http://www.spredfast.com

Social Media Initiative managed by Spredfast

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Welcome, Mr. Reseller, Take Off Your Coat & Stay Awhile

Jun 22

Posted by spredfast in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

We’ve opened our doors to welcome resellers to our home. We believe Spredfast is a great product companies, organizations and agencies can use to power their social media efforts. We also think our white label option makes Spredfast a perfect tool for those companies that sell services around social media to add a new revenue stream by reselling Spredfast as a branded social media management tool.

The program is pretty simple:

  • Sign up and we’ll call you to figure out a deal
  • We’ll work with you to set up your branded social media management platform
  • We’ll train you how to use it, support and most importantly, sell it
  • You work with your clients and prospects, and sell them campaigns on your branded platform
  • You charge what you want for the campaigns you sell, and pay us at a discounted rate

If this sounds interesting to you, visit our reseller page to learn more and sign up. We’re waiting for you. We might even have dinner and a drink ready.

 

Social Media Initiative managed by Spredfast

Announcing Spredfast 1.4 – Not Your Mom’s Social Media Management System

May 25

Posted by James Young in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Here at Social Agency, we’ve been hard at work building out great new Spredfast functionality that will not only help you engage your customers, supporters, members and advocates in the social sites they frequent, but will also empower you to prove to your boss and your boss’ boss that social media pays off. For those of you who don’t like to read, here is a bulleted list of the new features and improvements we’ve made in Spredfast 1.4. To read witty descriptions of these items, please keep scrolling.

Highlighted Features

  • Integrated Sentiment Analysis with Social Mention
  • White Label Option
  • Slideshare Integration
  • Chart and Report Builder

Improvements to Listening and Engagement

  • Twitter Direct Message Support
  • Email notification to users if event sending fails

Improvements to Managing & Streamlining

  • Initiative Tabs
  • Importing link tag templates between Initiatives
  • Improved invitations handling
  • Prevented duplicate streams

Improvements to Measuring & Reporting

  • Decreased metrics processing time

Integrated Sentiment Analysis

We already had an awesome platform for listening to the social conversation about your brand, products, and services or your organization, programs, and campaigns. With Spredfast 1.4, you can now quickly get a bead on the sentiment of that conversation by using our sentiment streams. Simply create a sentiment stream, plug in your keywords, and let our Social Mention integration do the rest. Each item Social Mention finds will have a sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative) and a sentiment score (e.g. +3, O, or -1).

You’ll be able to see charts showing the sentiment your overall positive to negative sentiment ratio, and the positive, neutral and negative trend for each sentiment stream you’ve created on the new Sentiment tab in the Metrics section. You’ll also be able to see granular sentiment data and trends on the Detailed Metrics tab (formerly known as the Activity Trend tab), with counts of positive, neutral and negative items as well as an overall sentiment score for each day for each sentiment stream. Finally, you’ll be able to click on an individual data point and see which content pieces drove the sentiment data for that day.

White Label Option

Want the items you publish into Twitter or Facebook to say “via {Your Company Name Here}” and the experience for your clients or staff to be branded to your company? Now you can, with the White Label option available with Spredfast 1.4. This new functionality is perfect for agencies that provide social media strategy and campaign management services. It also works pretty darn well for anybody else who just wants their brand to be front and center on their social media outreach as well. With the white label option, the sign in/sign up page and the entire administrative interface is branded to your specifications. The email sent from the system comes from your accounts. Best of all, the content published in the social sites comes from your company. Contact Spredfast to learn more about the white label option, pricing and how you can upgrade.

Slideshare Integration

Got content? Presentation content, that is. Do you use Slideshare to post and share your presentations, hoping to impress prospective customers, supporters and members with your brilliance? With Spredfast 1.4 you can easily publish presentations into Slideshare and measure the engagement with that content, without ever leaving your Spredfast dashboard. We track views and downloads, comments and favorites and bring the data to you in our wonder wall Detailed Metrics table.

Chart and Report Builder

Admit it, you like working with the numbers but you love making pretty charts and putting them into reports. With Spredfast 1.4, you can take the rich engagement, reach and activity data we capture, calculate the ROI on your social media efforts, and create exciting charts and reports that make it easy for everyone else to see how your social media efforts are paying off handsomely. Easy to use and powerful, with built in date range, voice, social media channel and account filters and the ability export to PDF, you’ll be able to showing the engagement trends by social media channel and highlighting strategic decision points before you know it.

We’re not finished yet, though. Spredfast 1.4 also has some added more great improvements to the 3 main functions of our platform: Listening & Engaging, Measuring & Reporting, and Managing & Streamlining.

First up in the Listening & Engagement arena, we’ve improved our Twitter capabilities with direct message (DM) support. Now, you can send a respond to a tweet with a DM. Next, we’ve added email notifications to assigned content creators if their content piece failed to publish for any reason.

In Measuring & Reporting, we’ve reduced the time it takes for Spredfast to acquire new data from the social sites, process the data and expose it the metrics section.

In Managing & Streamlining, we’ve done a lot to make Spredfast easier to use. First, for those clients managing a lot of social media initiatives, either within one or across several companies or organizations, we’ve added the capability to organize Initiatives onto tabs. For example, an agency might want to keep all Initiatives for one client on one tab, and another client’s initiatives on a second tab. Next, we’ve improved our invitation system so that people who are invited to join an Initiative, but lose the invitation email, will find their way to the right place every time. Third, clients who use our powerful link tagging and have integrated it to an external analytics package to measure activity all the way from clicking a link in a tweet to completing a purchase will find the new capability to import the link tag templates from one Initiative to another very useful and efficient. Finally, we’ve built a nifty feature that will automatically recognize a new Social Stream being created as a duplicate of an existing stream and prevent the duplication.

That’s it for now. We’re already working hard on the next release, adding some great new social sites to the mix and integrating some powerful enterprise systems that a lot of marketing departments are already using.

We recognize that not everyone knows Spredfast as well as we do, so if any of the descriptions above don’t make sense to you, please feel free to reach out to use. We love our product and we love talking with people, so we’ll be happy to answer any questions or explain any feature in more detail. Here’s how you can reach us:

Twitter: @spredfast or @socialagency

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Austin-TX/Social-Agency-Inc

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/companies/306252/

Email: ken@socialagency.com , scott@socialagency.com , or james@socialagency.com

Web: http://www.spredfast.com

Phone: 512-542-9900

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Social Media Ownership – Centralized or Distributed?

May 18

Posted by James Young in Spredfast | 4 Comments

As more and more companies, brands, and organizations begin to view social media as a legitimate channel to engage with their customers and their market, more and more people are beginning to ask the question, “Who is ultimately in charge of our social media efforts?” It’s a good, hard question.

Econsultancy ran a survey and found some data that is interesting, but perhaps not detailed enough.

The recent Mashable article and the comments on the article give some indication that no one really knows the answer. 

Which, when you think about it, is kind of an answer in itself. No one seems to have formed a strong enough argument for any one department to own the overall social media effort.

Some say the Marketing or PR group, because they know how to craft a message that is appropriate to the audience. But that breaks down somewhat when you consider how social media tends to act like water, expanding into every possible open space. The message may be right for a known audience, but when the message starts making its way to the second circle of people, is it still truly the best message?

Some say the Strategy group should own social media because that team is best positioned to advise users on “how” to use social media effectively. Well…I don’t know. I think there is an art to communicating in social media that may not be best served by strategists.

Some say the Customer Service group should own social media, because they are engaging one on one with real people in real conversations. True enough, and social media is an excellent vehicle for Support teams, but limiting social media to support scenarios is like saying TV should only be used for music videos (BTW, does MTV ever show videos anymore?).

Some say IT should own social media because it is really just another system. If you ask me, that discounts the human factor that is inherent in social media too much.

Finally, a lot of people say that everyone in the company ought to be involved in social media outreach. And I agree, for several reasons.

  1. Social media is an excellent way to communicate with people, and as we all know, every conversation has a different nature depending on the who and what of the conversation. So, everyone in the organization needs to be able to use social media channels to conduct their business.
  2. Social media efforts are more effective when you have both a variety of voices involved and they are all authentic voices.
  3. Social media is a better way to listen, and every department in every company can benefit from listening to how customers and prospects talk about the company.

If you agree with this, then the next question to ask is how I can get everyone involved in the company social media efforts. There are definitely control measures you will want to put in place.

  • You’ll need a policy to guide everyone in your company on how to behave appropriately
  • You’ll need a policy to state how your company will treat content from those outside of the company that is not appropriate
  • You’ll want to understand the cadence that works well in your social media channels and have a calendar view so you can stop over sharing before it happens

The tools you choose will also determine how distributed you can be. Ideally, the tools you choose are flexible enough to work well in a centralized and distributed model. The tools also should accommodate multiple authors, channels and content types. Finally, the tools should guide each user to generating great content, whether that means knowing the right keywords to include, the right tone to take, and the right format for the channel the content is going out on.

As you might have guessed, Spredfast is a tool that fits that bill. I’m just saying.

Social Media Initiative managed by Spredfast

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Spredfast Release 1.3 Notes (02.15.2010)

Mar 8

Posted by socialagency in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Spredfast announces Social Media Management platform version 1.3.

Version 1.3 enhances conversation management with continued development of Spredfast’s Actionable Data Engine (ADE).

With this release, Spredfast adds the Conversation Inbox, increases campaign coverage by integrating MySpace, provides actionable reports with metrics drill down and enhances social media ROI (Return on Investment) with link tagging support for major marketing analytical platforms such as Omniture, Web Trendz and Google Analytics.

Major new features, by category, include:

CONVERSATION MANAGEMENT

  • Conversation Inbox (Enterprise version only) – Add any social stream to the “inbox” to manage conversations and drive engagement. Quickly respond to comments, replies, retweets, mentions and search terms.
  • MySpace Integration (All versions) – Increase the reach and engagement of conversations by adding MySpace social network accounts. View engagement, reach and activity metrics for the MySpace social media channel.
  • Link Sharing on Facebook (All versions) – Preview how links will be displayed on Facebook. Select from available images that best represents the link’s content.

SOCIAL STREAMS

  • Added direct support for Social Bookmarking (All versions) – Bookmark search and RSS content from Social Streams on Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc.

METRICS & REPORTING

  • Metrics Drill Down (All versions) – Click on any campaign metric or graph to drill down into the content driving the number.  See what campaign content is most relevant and is driving engagement
  • Link Tagging Support (Enterprise version only) – Add metrics tags from popular marketing analytical platforms, such as Omniture and Google Analytics, to track goal conversions. See conversion effectiveness for each piece of content published for your campaign. Report the social media campaigns impact on marketing goals.
Social Media Campaign managed by Spredfast

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Engagement and Campaign Management Made More Effective

Jan 13

Posted by spredfast in Uncategorized | No Comments

The Spredfast team wants to let you all know about some very important changes we are making to the Campaign Dashboard, the Activity page, and the Social Intelligence features of our software.  In short, your feedback has led us to merge the Activity stream currently on the Dashboard with our Social Intelligence functions.

Campaign Dashboard

What it means

You will now have access to your Activity stream, your recently engaging content, and your Social Intelligence feeds, searches, lists, and followers, all from the Campaign Dashboard.  While we think you should still plan out your campaign with forethought and a message in mind, you can now also interact with other people’s content right away without having to locate it in either the Activity page or buried in the Social Intelligence popup while creating content.  Furthermore, we have added and enhanced some features of our searches and feeds, allowing these streams to provide you with an expanded amount of information exactly as you want it.

What you have to do

Nothing.  If you have already set up terms and feeds in your Social Intelligence, then we will move them over to the Social Streams interface.  And if you haven’t already set up your Social Intelligence features, now is a great time to start.  The process has changed for the better and your options for Social Streams have only improved.  Simply click on the “+ Add” button within the Social Streams section of the Campaign Dashboard or from the Social Streams page and you will have the opportunity to create a new stream.  From there, you can choose to add your Facebook stream, search Twitter, add the streams of those you follow, and many other options.

Adding a stream

What to do with Social Streams

Engage.  Social Streams are the evolution of Social Intelligence; we know you won’t have every post written beforehand while managing your campaign.  With Social Streams you can see the conversations out there and use them in your messaging and your social interactions.  We provide you with specific actions to take with content on the streams from quick posts to adding them to existing events to creating and assigning entirely new events.

take action on stream content

As always, we value your input.  If you have problems, questions, or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to provide them to us via the Feedback button on the site.  We appreciate your involvement and want to help you make your social media campaign as successful as possible.

Thanks,

The Spredfast Team

Social Media Campaign managed by Spredfast

Spredfast Release Notes for the Week of 11.30.2009

Dec 10

Posted by spredfast in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Spredfast is a social media campaign management platform that allows marketing teams to manage, monitor, and measure its social media campaigns and voices across multiple channels.  Spredfast maximizes your social media efforts by getting your content out to many social media channels with the least amount of effort while measuring the effectiveness of every piece of content published.

New features since the previous version:

  • Import posts from Twitter, YouTube, and blogs. Click the “Enable Auto-Import” in Campaign > Voices > Accounts Edit
  • Made microblog post link limits longer for Facebook-only posts. If you select only Facebook page accounts, you are allowed 420 characters.  If you select both Twitter and  Facebook page accounts, you will be limited to Twitters’s 140 character limit
  • Delayed retweet feature allowing subsequent voices to retweet an original tweet from another voice

Enhancements & Big Fixes:

  • Fixed issue with inaccurate character counts for certain characters.
  • Fixed an issue that could cause items to get stuck in queued status when sending under certain circumstances.
  • Better progress indicator for adding Facebook accounts to avoid confusion while processes complete in the background.
  • Changed info notifications to use a more attractive system.

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