Microsoft Social Engagement is a fantastic social listening tool available through certain Office 365 subscriptions. Social Engagement enables a user to track sentiment, influencers, detractors, popular phrases to boost the marketing effort. With a key focus on actionable insight, Microsoft Social Engagement has many useful features such as Social Selling function to help users respond quickly and directly to potential new prospect. A key new feature for Summer that we are excited about is Social Selling Assistant, this will really help empower sales teams. To find out more about all the great Social Engagement updates, please continue to read below or contact us for more information.

Social Engagement updates for Summer ‘17:

Service and product improvements

There have been no major infrastructure changes, however, there have been several user-facing changes. Microsoft is committed to user-experience and the product is continually refined, based on customer feedback. Changes for July include:

· Improved loading times for Search Setup page when there a large number of search topics.

· Improved user experience when working with maps

· Improved provisioning Social Engagement in some countries/regions.

· Improved Social Selling Assistant in private browsing mode on an iOS device.

· Improved global notifications in Social Selling Assistant when using IE11.

· Improved timespan drop-down in Activity Maps.

· Enhanced Settings > Global Settings > Location Groups with missing tooltips.

· Improved Search Setup when editing search topic categories using Firefox browser.

· Enhanced Settings > Social Profiles with missing tooltips.

· Increased contrast ratio on re-tweet dialog for better readability.

· Increased line spacing within paragraphs on posts displayed in Social Centre and Social Selling Assistant for better readability.

Engagement Analytics with Power BI

Microsoft is extending the recently introduced Power BI content pack for Social Engagement with the new Engagement Analytics report; adding to the Engagement Performance and Team Performance reports previously released. The Engagement Analytics report provides you additional insights regarding your engagement on social media with metrics based on location, sentiment, tags and authors. The data model is also enhanced to include these additional dimensions giving you more power to explore and analyse your Social Engagement data.

Power BI content pack for Social Engagements

Microsoft Social Engagement introduces the Microsoft Power BI content pack to get insights about your engagement and team performance on social media. This content pack is designed specifically for community managers, providing performance metrics for engagement actions taken from within Social Engagement. Track metrics, such as number of actions taken and average response times, and get visibility into the performance of each member of your team. Power BI automatically creates the dashboard and reports that give you a great starting point for exploring and analysing your Social Engagement data.

Conversation view for private messages and Twitter Replies

Starting with this update, Social Engagement shows you any conversation that involves private messages (Facebook or Twitter) and Twitter replies of one of your social profiles. It displays the back and forth between two authors sorted by showing the latest post first. At the top, you will see the two authors, including the one that belongs to your team. It also shows the team members who answered as that social profile.

Improved usability with Social Selling

Microsoft has adapted the forms in the Social Selling Assistant configuration and Social Engagement Settings Page User Preferences to industry standards. When editing those forms the Save and Cancel buttons are now the bottom of the input form. Additionally, the main navigation now contains a direct link to the Post view in Analytics, filtered for private messages, so you can get to your customers’ messages in a single click.

Get Insights with Social Selling Assistant

The Microsoft Social Engagement Social Selling Assistant introduces a new recommendation type: Get Insights. This adds to the existing recommendations for sharing content. This new type provides recommendations for posts about your customers, competitors, and other topics of interest, so you can stay on top of the latest developments. With this addition, you can now get a separate set of recommendations for sharing content and insights

Sell more with Social Selling Assistant

Microsoft Social Engagement introduces Social Selling Assistant, to empower your salespeople to sell more by leveraging social media. With this application, your salespeople get personalised and smart recommendations to share on their social networks to enable them to increase their social presence, gain trust from their followers, and generate more leads.

You can access Social Selling Assistant from within Microsoft Social Engagement and install it from Microsoft AppSource into your Dynamics 365 for Sales application. The AppSource app adds a new dashboard that contains the Social Selling Assistant. Salespeople can access this dashboard from the Dynamics 365 web client, as well as from Dynamics 365 for tablets. Dynamics 365 for phones is currently not supported.

Share a post with LinkedIn

With this release, you can add your personal LinkedIn account as a social profile. With it you can share any public post in Microsoft Social Engagement to your professional network on LinkedIn. Your LinkedIn social profile will be available for the post action Post Link. When you share to LinkedIn, you can choose between two visibility options: show the post to everyone on LinkedIn or to your network only. This post action is available across all Microsoft Social Engagement services, including the newly released Social Selling Assistant.

Other updates Social Engagement updates include:

– User interface is now available in Japanese and Chinese languages.

To read the full list and details of latest Microsoft Social Engagement updates, please click HERE

If you would like further information on Microsoft Social Engagements and how it can benefit your business, please contact us on 01296 328 689 or email us at info@seelogic.co.uk.