If there’s one thing Microsoft has been doing consistently, it’s rolling out updates to fast-improving Social Engagement.  In 2016 alone, we have seen five updates to Social Engagement, offering improved features and increased functionality. With this Microsoft Social Engagement 2016 Update 1.4, Microsoft is continually chiseling MSE into an important tool for social-media-conscious marketers to consider in their marketing strategy.  Today, we’ll be discussing what’s new with the most recent update of Social Engagement and why it could benefit today’s busy marketers!

Custom Tags

Custom tags are an extension of intention tags which were rolled out in a previous update.  Intention tags were a result of Social Engagement analyzing the intent of an author’s post and categorizing it into buckets that it created based on the various intentions of posts.  These intentions are then displayed in the Intention Tags widget in the Conversations page of Analytics. Just like all widgets in Social Engagement, this widget is clickable and can be drilled into.  This ability also means that you can click one of the intention buckets and pull out the post tab to view posts of a particular intention.

Now, you can take it a step further and create your own tags for posts.  This practice will be useful as you scroll through posts and want to categorize posts based on your needs for your marketing efforts.  For example, you can create a tag for customer complaints and any post that you need to follow up with to address a complaint can be added to the customer complaint bucket to be addressed once you’ve scanned through your recent posts.  Although custom tags may not seem like a big deal, it is yet another way that Microsoft is equipping social-media-conscious marketers with tools to work as efficiently as possible.

Forums as a Source

A continual complaint with Microsoft Social Engagement has been its lack of sources as options to monitor.  However, with this update, Microsoft has added forums as a source that can be included in search topics, streams, analytics, activity maps, etc.

This is an important addition because forums include discussions of various products, services, etc. and allow you to cast a wider net in your social media monitoring efforts.  You can monitor the questions people are asking on forums centered around your brand, product, or service which allows further consolidation of monitoring activities to one place – and who doesn’t love being able to do more job functions in one place!  Additionally, it seems that Microsoft is putting a good chunk of effort into developing more sources.  With Instagram also on the horizon of becoming an integrated source in Social Engagement, Microsoft definitely seems to be channeling resources into integrating more platforms into Social Engagement.

Respond to a Public Tweet with a Private Message

Sometimes, a conversation needs to be moved to a private means when you’re helping resolve customer issues.   Now, instead of needing to tab over to your company or brand’s Twitter account, you can send a link to start a private message conversation from within Social Engagement.  This allows you to resolve issues quickly and privately when a problem arises, which in turn better serves your customers!

Want Additional Help?

If you’re interested in learning more about Social Engagement, feel free to request our free download on how to listen, understand, connect, and know using Microsoft Social Engagement or check out our upcoming webinars to learn more about how you can leverage Microsoft Dynamics products in your organization.