Although gutted to wake up earlier in the year to the news of the Social Specialist Certification was going away (being one of the 2 achieved last year, sniff…)
Alright, enough of the tiny violin!
We always talk about the core Salesforce platform when it’s release prep time. But this time I want to take a moment to look at Social Studio, as with the upcoming release I think there are few updates well worth mentioning.
Instagram is ‘almost’ there.
This social channel is already available to connect within your Social Studio, but this release brings quite few handy updates.
Within ‘Engage’ replies are ingested as replies and you can now separate them from comments with filters. This enables you to use those filters in ‘Analyze Dashboards’ too, yet still having threaded view within ‘Engage’ for the conversations, as it does today for all other channels.
The other great update is the ability to view now tagged content that mentions your social account, and of course use it as filter within Engage and Analyze. You can easily spot those by a little person icon within an image:
However! Due to a limitation currently in the Instagram API engagement on tagged content is not yet available within Social studio 🙁 but it will be made available as soon as Instagram enables it.
A feature that I was hoping to see but shall continue to wait patiently for Instagram to enable in their APIs the direct messaging, so that you can view and respond to DMs within Social Studio.
Another great addition coming up in the Instagram theme for this release are the Stories. Now you can natively publish story content in the Social studio Calendar and of course measure performance within publish and cross-workspace reports.
Facebook Recommendations
Following the filtering theme, here is including the ability to filter conversations if the individual recommends (or not) your brand. This helps you to prioritise the efforts and adjust the tone of voice giving context if you are talking with a promoter or not. Ain’t just the same.
Another Facebook related update is that Interests are now available in ‘Publish’ as targeting options (you already have location, age, gender and language)
Bye Bye Google+
Not strictly related release news, but some of you may have received an email or read that Google is facing out Google+. So From March 2019 you wont be able to publish or view Google+ content in Social Studio. The degradation in service has already started. You can find more info here: https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/expediting-changes-google-plus/
Social Studio Integration Changes with Customer Service
Last year, Facebook announced that App Scoped IDs would no longer be supported in lieu of Page Scoped IDs. So the Social Customer Service is migrating personas for each ASID mapped to the corresponding PSID.
You won’t notice much change a side of seeing some duplicates (and it’s effect on data storage). As well as Facebook enforcing recency of personas interacting with your page within last 3 years and with Facebook platform overall.
Here’s a bit more about it: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=000274238&language=en_US&type=1