Symphony is an all-in-one dashboard to publish, schedule, and manage your content on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.

User Guide: Assign Tasks

May 13, 2013 by

Symphony’s task (conversation?) center is a central hub where you can quickly respond to all incoming mentions, comments, messages, and conversations around your brand. Think of it as your social inbox. There are several powerful features in the task center to help streamline your workflow:

  • Smart filtering to select which kind of incoming conversations you want to see
  • The ability to set brand keywords for monitoring purposes
  • View saved and archived conversations
  • View tasks sent to you by other members on your team
  • Cross Post conversations to multiple social networks

Filter Your Incoming Conversations

You can select which kinds of incoming messages you see by toggling the filtering options at the (top/side) of the page. You can filter by social network, or by specific types of conversations: private messages, comments, posts you’re tagged in, and brand search results.

Set Brand Keywords

Symphony’s task center is designed to help you never miss a conversation about you or your brand. Symphony will show you any time someone mentions your brand keywords on Facebook or Twitter, even if they don’t tag you or post it on your page. Brand keywords default to the names of your linked social profiles, but you can also customize what terms you’d like to include.

To edit your brand search terms:

  1. Hover over ‘brand search’ in the left menu & click the pencil icon.
  2. Enter one search term per line. Clicking ‘New Search Term’ will create additional lines. Each separate line is treated as ‘OR.’

For more tips on setting up your search terms, see our detailed Search How-To. [link]

Saved and Archived Conversations

Both the Task Center and Reader tabs allow you to save and archive posts, which can be viewed later in the Task Center. Saved posts are meant to be action items or important conversations you may want to access in the future. Archive is for removing posts from your inbox to clean up the clutter. To save or archive a conversation:

  1. Hover over the desired post in the Task Center or Social Reader – you’ll see several options pop up below the post. [screenshot]
  2. Saved posts are meant to be action items requiring response/attention, while the archive is like a recycling bin that holds posts you no longer wish to see.
  3. Saved/Archived posts can be accessed from the menu on the left-hand side of the page.

 Assign Tasks

One last feature of the Task Center is the ability to assign tasks to collaborators and team members. You can do this from the pop-up menu that appears when you hover over a conversation (just like you would to save and archive).

  1. Hover over the desired post and find ‘assign task.’
  2. You will prompted with a list of facebook contacts to assign the task to
  3. ?? (not quite sure how this works yet)

Task Flow With Symphony

We built symphony with the desire to accommodate many users with different work flows – we want you to be able to use Symphony in the most efficient manner for your business. However, there are some basic tips that may streamline your work flow and task management in Symphony.

[this section about advanced uses for the Task Center and ways to be more efficient.]

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User Guide: Brand Mentions Search

May 13, 2013 by

Brand search is a powerful feature to find out what people say about you on social networks. Symphony scours Twitter and Facebook to find mentions of your brand (and any common variations and misspellings) and present them in a simple list in one place. From there you can reply or comment on those mentions directly from one place.

Setting up Brand Search

First go to the Inbox page (see the image below). If you don’t see an “Inbox” menu then maybe your subscription plan doesn’t provide it. In which case, consider upgrading your plan. The inbox is meant to aggregate mentions of your brand so you can easily respond to them at once. Thus, we recommend you put only your brand keywords, not general industry keywords. Using anything other than your brand name will most likely clutter your inbox, making it difficult to see the posts you really need to respond to.

symphony-inbox-brand-search

One feature that makes searches powerful in Symphony is the ability to reply to and Cross-Post search results to your own networks. If you hover over a given post you’ll see several options pop up: Crosspost, Reply, Retweet, and Favorite for Twitter, and Like, Comment, and Share Facebook.

The “Task” button will assign this post to a teammate to respond to (available in select plans). Crosspost allows you to share that post to any social profile, even if it’s on a different social network.

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Crossposting to Social Profiles

May 13, 2013 by

Crosspost is a nifty tool to quickly share content across several social profiles. Crossposting is straightforward: click the Crosspost button, select your targets, write something, click Post. That’s the basic flow. But there are a lot of interesting little gems that can save you a lot of time. Read on!

Let’s start with an example. Here I’ll share a link to our Facebook page and Twitter accounts. As you see, I’m selecting the two targets from the list of profiles that I’ve connected to Symphony already. Then I just copy&paste the link into the big text area on the left side. Immediately, Crosspost reads the link and adds the title, summary, and image. The area on the right side shows a preview of how the post will look like on each of the social networks I’m about to post it to.

Using Crosspost

Important things to notice in the animation above:

  • You can select many targets to publish the post to several places at once. However, you must’ve already connected those targets to Symphony from the home page.
  • Notice how I paste the link only in the text area and Symphony automatically populates the rest (title, image, and summary). You can edit the details afterwards.
  • The preview on the right side is essential. It let’s you see how your post will look like before you post it, so you can make any necessary edits if needed.
  • Once you click Post, the post will be immediately published to the targets you selected.

 

What Else Can I do in Crosspost?

Now that we covered the basics, here are some of the other things you can do in Crosspost:

  • Schedule posts for later.
  • Edit the attached image.
  • Search for public-domain and Creative Common images to attach to your post
  • Pull images from Dropbox.
  • Share your latest blog posts.
  • Crosspost someone else message from the Inbox. For example, if someone write something nice about you and you’d like to share it.

Crosspost social media publishing power tool

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User Guide: Adding a Blog Tab to your Facebook Page

May 10, 2013 by

The Facebook Blog Tab adds a prominent app and menu item to your Facebook page to make your blog easily accessible to anyone visiting your Facebook page. This allows your fans to see your recent posts right on your Facebook page.

blog_tab

 

How to install the Blog Tab?

Three easy steps directly from the Symphony home page:

  1. Connect both, your blog and your Facebook page, to Symphony (by clicking “Add Profiles & Blogs”). You can find more details here.
  2. On the box of your Facebook page in Symphony click Add Blog Tab.

Add your Blog as a Tab on facebook business page

 

3. Then select the theme and layout for your tab, hit save, and you’re done.

add_blog_tab


Themes and Layouts

You can choose from several different types of layouts and themes. For example:

  • Full Post – great if you want to keep readers on your Facebook page
  • Post headlines with excerpt – ideal for previewing your blog and sending traffic back to your website
  • Large image gallery – perfect for showcasing your latest work

 

Customize the Tab’s Appearance on Facebook

If you want to further customize the look of your blog tab button and menu on Facebook, you can do so directly on Facebook. By default the tab button uses a light blue style that matches Facebook’s own style. Most users keep that default as it’s nice and consistent with Facebook’s default buttons. But if you like to customize that, then go to your page’s Settings section and edit the tab name and image there.

blog_button

 

 

That’s all for setting up your blog tab. If you have any questions reach out to us on the chat box inside Symphony.

 

 

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User Guide: Workgroups & Collaborators

April 19, 2013 by

Symphony was built with power publishers and social media professionals in mind. If you’re like us even just a tiny bit, you probably have multiple groups of profiles you’d like to manage. Symphony allows you to compile your profiles into separate Workgroups. You then have the ability to quickly toggle between groups to see a single set of profiles at once.symphony-toggle-workgroups

Here are some ways you might want to use the groups feature to manage your various profiles:

  • Create a separate group for your clients
  • Create separate groups for your business and personal profiles
  • Create a group for each of your blogs & their corresponding social media profiles

Setting up Your Groups

  1. First, link all your desired social profiles and blogs on the home page. These go into your ‘My Profiles’ group by default.
  2. Go to the Group Management page by clicking ‘Organize Into Groups’ on the home dashboard, or by using the drop-down menu in the upper-righthand corner of the screen.
  3. To create a new group, click the ‘New Workgroup’ button at the top of the page. Add any desired social profiles and click done.
  4. You can edit the group name by clicking the pencil in the group header.workgroup-setup

Collaborators in Groups

Symphony allows you to collaborate with team members. You can assign team members to be either an Admin or a User in a group. Admins have the ability to change settings for any of the social profiles in that group, while users can read, respond to conversations, and schedule posts.workgroup-setup symphony-workgroup-collaborators

Each collaborator will see only the profiles in the group they’ve been added to, and every team member in the same workgroup will see the same pages when they view that group.

For more on how to get the most out of Symphony for your team, see our guides on using the inbox and assigning tasks.

 

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Syndication: Auto-Publish your Blog to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

April 11, 2013 by

If you share your blog posts to your social profiles on a regular basis then Syndication might be your favorite feature. It saves you time and automates some of the repetitive tasks in your day. Set it up once, and then it automatically shares every new blog post you write to your social profiles on an ongoing basis.

Symphony offers the fastest syndication in the industry: once a new blog post appears on your blog, Symphony detects it and publishes it to the social profiles that you’ve selected within seconds for most modern blogging platforms, and in less than 5 minutes for older blogging platforms.

Setting Up Syndication

  1. As with any other feature, the first step is to connect your blogs and social profiles to Symphony. In this case, connect the blog that you want to syndicate, and also connect the social profiles that you want to publish to, such as your Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and LinkedIn Profiles. You do this by clicking on the “Add Profiles & Blogs” button. If you’re having difficulty with this step, see more details here.
  2. On the Symphony home page you’ll see the Syndication box at the top of the page. Click on “Setup Syndication”.
    syndication_box
  3. Now you’re on the Syndication page. Select the blog you want to syndicate from, then select all the target social profiles. Your page should look like this:
    Blog Syndication with Symphony
  4. The preview at the bottom of the page shows you how your most recent post will look like on each of the social networks you selected.

You’re all set. Going forward, any new blog post you write on your blog will be automatically shared to the social profiles you selected.

 

FAQ

Q: Can I syndicate more than one blog?

Yes. You can repeat the same steps to add another blog. And you can set different syndication targets for each blog.

Q: Does syndication publish old posts?

No. Syndication works going forward. It auto-publishes new blog posts that you write after syndication was activated. If you want to share existing posts, use the Crosspost tool.

Q: My posts are being shared without images, or with the wrong images. Why?

Symphony reads your RSS feed and extracts the images from it. If your RSS feed doesn’t include images then Symphony won’t be able to see them. Here are a few things you might want to check:

  • Use full feeds, not partial. In WordPress, go to your dashboard then select Settings -> Reading -> Set the option For each article in a feed, show to Full Text. If you’re on Blogger then it’s Settings -> Other -> and then set Allow Blog Feed to Full.
  • If you’re on WordPress and you use Featured Images (i.e. images that are not embedded in the content of your post) then those images are not included in your RSS feed. You’ll need to install the Featured Image in RSS plugin to include your featured images in your feed.

After you’ve made the changes above, refresh your feed (see next question) and verify that your images are being read correctly. If not, reach out to us on the chat box in Symphony and we’ll look into it further.

Q: How do I test my RSS feed and make sure it’s working?

Symphony has a built-in feed tester. From the home page, find the box of your blog and click the “Refresh” link.

blog_box_refresh

That will show a green message detailed the status of your feed and the latest article. It will also include a link to the Feed Tester tool.

feed_tester_message

 

 

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