Thanks to Click Social Marketing, creating, scheduling, and publishing social posts to various social profiles and tracking the click activity is easy! This article will discuss how to create social posts, after the prerequisite steps of setting up a CNAME for social marketing and the necessary social profiles have been created.
NOTE: Before you can create Social Posts, a CNAME for social marketing must be set up, as well as setting up the connectors to post to various social profiles. Click here to learn how to set up a CNAME for social marketing. Click here to learn how to set up the various social profile connectors.
Goals
- Learn how to create a Social Post
- Learn how to schedule Social Posts
- Learn how to set up a recurring Social Post
Table of Contents
Navigate to Social Posts
When you are ready to create your Social Post, navigate to either Messaging > Social Platform or Messaging > Social Posts and then select Social Platform from the options:
This will open a new login window. Enter the email and password that was setup for your Account Owner in the Social Marketing Settings and click Sign In to continue to the Social Platform.
This will bring you into the Social Platform's main page.
Create a Campaign
Before you can create social posts, you will need to create a campaign to group and organize your posts and their analytics. To create a campaign, navigate to Publishing > Campaigns and select the New Campaign option.
You can then fill in a name for your Campaign and add any desired Tags to apply to it. The tags are used to group messages that have similarities in order to analyze them side by side and can be updated in the Campaign settings later.
Once you are done, select Create Campaign to create the campaign.
Creating a Social Post
After creating your campaign, you can then either select your campaign or navigate to Publishing > Calendar and select the New Post option to begin creating your post. You will be directed to a new window where you will set the details for this social post:
1. Choose a Social Network
The icons along the top of the Social Post window will allow you to select which social profile and network you would like to the post to be published to. Click here to see an index of articles on how to set up the various social profiles in Marketing Automation.
2. Select a Social Profile(s)
This arrow will open a drop-down menu that allows you to select which Social Profile(s) on the selected Social Network you would like to post to. You can add multiple profiles to post to at the same time by clicking the + icon next to a profile's name and you can remove selected profiles by selecting the X icon next to the profile.
3. Message contents
Set the content for your social post in the field in place of the What would you like to share? text. This can include links, and the clicks on these links will be what is tracked and collected within your Dynamics environment. For this example, we will be using our Facebook Page connector, but the process is essentially the same no matter which social profile you are posting to.
Facebook Link images: When linking to a webpage in your Facebook post, you can select the image your post should use, however, if linking to your site, you will need to verify your site's domain with Facebook. Otherwise, the image shown in the post will be pulled from the page and not be the image that you set up here.
4. Select Campaign
Select which Social Campaign you would like to associate the post with. The post will appear on the calendar for that specific campaign and all analytics from the post will also associate back to this campaign.
5. Add Image, Video, or GIF
The Add Image, Video, or GIF option lets you add visual media into your social post.
This will open a new window where you can either upload a file locally from your machine or you can upload an image from one of the offered services.
Select the desired image once it has been uploaded into this image manager. You will then be able to use the provided image editing options to make any desired changes before you select the Add button to add the image to your post.
6. Select Message
If you have saved any Messages to your Campaign, then you can select those here to populate your Social Post with the contents of the saved Message. Any post that you've successfully published to your selected Campaign should automatically be saved as a Message that can be used again in future posts.
7. Choose your Audience
Certain social networks, such as Facebook, will allow you to choose how to target your audience for your social post. You can allow the post to be seen by everyone, target people by a specific region, or by specific criteria from their social accounts on that social network.
8. Schedule a time to send
The When: Now option allows you to schedule one or multiple dates and times to send your social post. Selecting this option will open up the Posting Times window, where you can set the desired date and time for your post.
You can also use the Add Another option to allow multiple scheduled instances to be set for the same post. Once you have scheduled your times, then you can use the Set button to confirm and schedule the posts.
You can also use the Queue option to post during one of the defined time periods in your Social Profile's queue settings. To access the Queue Settings, you can navigate to Settings > General > Social Profiles and then select Edit Queue Settings next to the social profile that you want to update:
This will open up the Queue Settings where you can define certain time periods for each desired day and a number of posts to be made during this time period.
When a designated time is reached, then the profile will attempt to send up to the number of designated posts that are currently queued up.
9. Add a PDF
To add an PDF, click the Add PDF button to choose a PDF file for the post. This will open a new window where you can either upload a file locally from your machine or upload a PDF from your account on one of the provided services.
Select the desired PDF once it has been uploaded into this file manager. Select the Add button to add the PDF to your post.
10. Select Tags
The Select Tags option allows you to set tags that are used to group messages that have similarities in order to analyze them side by side. You can search your existing tags or you can enter a new tag and select the + icon to create a new tag to apply.
Once you have selected your desired tags, you can click Done to apply them to your post.
Branded Links in Social Posts
Links added to your social posts will be converted to okt.to links for tracking if they start with http or https. But a link beginning with www (or something other than http/https) won’t convert to okt.to.
Publishing a Social Post
Once you are happy with your social post properties, you will have some different options depending on what timing you selected in Step 8. If your post is set to send immediately, then you can click Post Now to publish the post.
If the post is scheduled, this option will be replaced by the Schedule option which you will need to click to fully schedule the post.
If you used the Queue option, then this option will be replaced with Queue option which will insert the post into the queue for your profiles.
Finally, if you select the Save as Draft option, then this will save a copy of this post into the Messages section of your selected Social Campaign and create a post that needs to be approved to publish. You can approve these by navigating to Publishing > Approvals and clicking Approve on the social post that you wish to publish.
Once your social post is scheduled or posted, you can navigate to Publishing > Calendar to view your social posts. Blue posts will represent social posts that have already sent, while red posts indicate posts that are scheduled, require approval, or have not yet been sent yet.
These details will also be captured in your CRM environment. Continue to the Social Post Reporting article for more information.