Welcome to the first post about in a series of many that will walk you through various features in both the Publicaster and Professional Edition platforms. We’ll explain how you can use each feature to help send smarter, more personalized messages through segmentation of data, targeted content and effective automation. Each Friday, we’ll alternate Publicaster and a Professional feature topics. So, since we’re focusing on a Publicaster feature today, next Friday we’ll give Professional Edition the chance to show off what it can do.

Just in case you missed the bus on our spring 2013 Publicaster product release, here’s the news: We’ve got four new features for you to make good use of. If you haven’t already, hop over to our release page and become acquainted with all four features. See the one called social-only campaigns? It’s the underdog of these features: seemingly insignificant but wielding the potential power to help you market smarter.

Convenience. Creativity. Capability to collect the right data: This is what the social-only campaign feature brings you. It uses the direct social publishing feature without incorporating an email delivery element. The convenience is that you send immediately or schedule it to go out at a later time, and you can be as creative as you want with what you choose to post to different social networks. Also, since this social feature utilizes the capabilities of Publicaster social reporting, you can collect data about your social networking activities and their effects.

The social-only feature is found under Campaign Manager. Choose Send/Schedule:

First, choose if you want to add Google Analytics tracking to all of the links you include in your posting, and what part of the content you wish to track (email name, email subject or customer tracking title). If custom tracking title is your choice, you’ll be provided with a box to enter your text. The benefit the social only campaign is that if the links don’t work, then you can simply log in to your social network(s) and delete the post. There is a link checker in the Publicaster Creative Manager, which will even simulate links with Google Analytics added, or you can post to your network and test the links from there.

Another way you can garner right data from this feature is by enabling EyeView, which tracks the amount of time subscribers spend reading the content you’ve posted. If you’re not seeing EyeView as a part of your social-only campaign, it’s because this is an optional feature that gives you specific insight into the behavior of your social users, and targets who your social influencers are. EyeView costs a little extra, but is well worth it.

Next, you’ll want to insert a physical email address for the distribution by using information already stored in Publicaster or by entering a new address. The next part is pretty straightforward: Decide what campaign you want to use for this post. Want to save the details of this social posting for use in the future? Just name it, and Publicaster will save it.

Select the email template you want to use, and then get creative writing a subject line! If you don’t want to launch this post immediately, this is the part where you get to choose when you do want it to go out.

Now comes the actual social integration part where you choose on which social media outlets you want your campaign to appear. This is where you connect your Publicaster account to your Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn accounts. The set up is a one-time event, and it the authentication process is done using OAUTH. If you are logged into your social media accounts outside of Publicaster, you can automatically connect by clicking on the social media icons in Publicaster:

After making sure your accounts are linked to Publicaster, it’s time to publish. Guess what? You’ve got more creative opportunity here, because you can –and should- write a short Facebook message. Make sure you choose the thumbnail you want to appear on Facebook with this post; if you let Facebook do it, you may end up with something good, but you may not. You’re off the hook with creating tag-alongs for Twitter and LinkedIn because it simply posts the subject line you’ve already written along with a web link.

The last step is to enter your email address and the email addresses of those you want to receive a notification when this social-only campaign goes out. Hit the “Share Content” button, and watch the magic happen!

Have questions about social-only campaigns? That’s what we’re here for. Just send an email to support@whatcounts.com and we’ll do our best to help you out.

Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

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