Whether you’re the CMO of your organization, a customer service representative, or someone who needs to leverage social data, Microsoft Social Engagement equips users with a powerful, easy-to-use, and robust platform to gain an edge in the social media landscape. A lot has changed since Microsoft first introduced the tool (originally titled Microsoft Social Listening) and with the new updates in place, users will get to jump into a whole new social experience, rich with customization, collaboration, and automation. In today’s blog, we will take a look at the new features and functionality!
1. Improved and Streamlined UI
Some of you may remember the Microsoft Social Listening of days past, with its default landing screen that had a unique, spherical design with various tools and data included. Now, Microsoft Social Engagement offers up an intuitive, modern feel that aims to reduce noise while simultaneously showcasing the added analytics enhancements. As an added bonus, there’s the option of choosing between light and dark themes as you can see in the examples below.
2. Search
The search functionality has been simplified to create a better user experience all around. Create new search categories and get a breakdown of the topics included in each of those categories. The two-page redesign is paired with a handy Quota snapshot. This provides users with insight on how a new search will impact the monthly post quota allotted by the system.
3. Enhanced Analytics
The amount of data you can pull into Microsoft Social Engagement can be a bit overwhelming at times, but with the new features comes a more powerful analytics engine that allows users to pinpoint the valuable social data they’re really after. With one click, users are able to transform and visualize social data through interactive widgets, filter and refine data streams on the fly, and navigate and drill down into new Conversations, Sentiment, Location, and Sources insights.
Conversations is a new addition to Microsoft Social Engagement, complete with key phrases, phrase source breakdowns, and trends.
Sentiment has been beefed up with improved location insights, a fans and critics breakdown, and the most frequently used phrases based on your search, including both positive and negative.
4. Social Center
Here’s where the power of collaboration takes shape in Microsoft Social Engagement. Within the Social Center, users are able to see social data feeds based on defined filters; give specific posts a status label and assign them to users; and engage directly with any post:*
*Not all users have this functionality out-of-the-box. User roles can be defined in Settings –> User Management to assign different levels of Configuration and Interaction roles. Users must also have social profiles established for interactions.
5. Activity Maps
Activity Maps are one of the newest additions to Microsoft Social Engagement. With Activity Maps, users can create heat-map-like depictions of their social data across the globe. From there, it’s easy to drill down into specific areas; parse that data by time, sentiment, or specific search topic, and navigate to the Analytics area with one click.
6. Message Center
Do you want to know whenever someone tweets about one of your products or services? Or maybe just when that tweet contains some positive or negative content? Alerts and alert frequency can be created in the Social Engagement Message Center. This automation is extremely useful for sales, marketing, and customer service teams looking to bolster their social media presence and customer or prospect engagement. With the ability to be notified of specific phrases, sentiment, or any other search parameters, teams will never be caught off guard if there’s a developing social trend or negative sentiment being posted. On top of that, you can designate multiple recipients of the alerts, even if they’re not an active user in the system.
Of course, the true value of Microsoft Social Engagement comes from its pairing with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. When integrated, users open up a brand new way to analyze and manage leads, accounts, cases, and more. Not only that, but users can interact directly with the data being pulled into Dynamics CRM for another level of insight.
The inherent value is striking: social dashboards for sales, marketing, or customer service teams that provide up-to-date posts, trends, advanced analytics reviews, and more to be able to tailor sales, campaign, or service strategies on the fly; immediately available social insights on lead or account records to equip your sales team with knowledge on a potential customer’s product trends; and the ability to jump to between Dynamics CRM and Social Engagement in one click and deep-dive into specific trends or sentiment indices. All of that can be done with Dynamics CRM and Social Engagement!
Given the gamut of the new and powerful features found within Microsoft Social Engagement, it’s easy to see just how much value it brings to the table, especially when used with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Check out our webinar, What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, for more great marketing tips!
Happy CRM’ing!