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

Symphony Update: Bit.ly Integration

October 1, 2013 by

social media dashboard Integration with bitlyWe added Bit.ly link shortening to our Crosspost publishing tool. Now, every link you insert into the Crosspost dialog box will be automatically shortened with Bit.ly.

The Bi.ly link shortening feature is turned on as a default setting. To make the most out of the Bit.ly integration, you should connect your own account. By connecting your own account you will have access to analytics of everything you Crosspost on your own Bit.ly page.

To access the settings and configure your own Bit.ly account, click the Publishing tab on the top of the Symphony dashboard. From there, select the “Options” button.

Symphony Integration with Bitly

Integration with Bit.ly makes your messages look cleaner and provides analytics. Connecting your own Bit.ly account will also save you time by not having to go outside of the Crosspost publisher to shorten your links. If you don’t want to shorten your links, with one click you can toggle the feature on and off.

bitly link shortening

Crosspost is the power tool of social media publishing! You can download the free Crosspost Chrome extension here.

Filed Under: Announcements, User Guide

User Guide: Publishing Images

September 5, 2013 by

Publishing Images Got a Whole Lot Awesomer!

A tool designed for publishing beautiful content is at your fingertips. Added to the drag-an-drop and built-in image search features, the Symphony publisher now has the ability to connect directly to your Dropbox folder and edit your images! Photoshop skills? Who need ’em!

Built-in Image Search

Eliminate wasting ungodly amounts of time scouring the web for the perfect image to publish. The built-in image search suggests an image for your post based on what you write. All of the suggested images are public domain and creative commons. This is 2013, who has time for downloading and uploading anymore?

built in Image search in symphony

Built-in Image Editor

It’s ok if you aren’t a photoshop wiz. You can edit the photos you want to use right in the publisher. You can add text, filters, graphics, draw, and more. Quickly add your own flare to any image and make it unique. Create a new meme, add a hashtag, display your company’s url, highlight specific parts of an infographic, put a funny hat on a picture of your CEO… the options are endless!

edit photos in symphony publisher

Select effect in symphony image publishing

filters for symphonytools publishing

MJ_added-effects

Publish edited images with symphony

 

Dropbox Integration

Grab your own photos from the cloud! The Dropbox plugin lets you use photos from any of your folders right within the publisher. If your mobile device is synced up to your Dropbox account, you can snap a picture of your coworker sleeping, add a great caption, and share it with the world!

Use images from dropbox with symphony

Edited images from Dropbox

 

Filed Under: Announcements, User Guide

Symphony Adds LinkedIn Integration

August 27, 2013 by

We just released another update to our social media dashboard – LinkedIn integration! Now you can monitor, manage, and publish to your news feed and groups from one place. Here is a quick overview of the new features.

Connecting your LinkedIn Profile and Groups

The first step is to add the profiles and groups you want to manage through Symphony. Do that from the home page by clicking “Add Profiles & Blogs”.

Add LinkedIn to Social Media management tool

Posting Status Updates, Links, and Pictures

We wanted to make reading and interacting with multiple groups as streamlined as possible to save you time and effort trying to keep up. You can create a “new post” and Crosspost immediately to each place in LinkedIn you would like.

Post to LinkedIn groups

Read and Interact from One Place

The Symphony Reader allows you to view and interact with all of your connections and group members from one single page. From the Reader you can “Like” and “Comment” on news feed and group posts.

Social Media Management tool for LinkedIn

Setting up your Publishing Schedule

Don’t bombard your connections with a flurry of back-to-back posts. Add LinkedIn posts to your queue and have your messages go out throughout the day. Every time you Crosspost, you have the option to “Post Now” or “Queue.” Clicking on the Queue button adds posts to your calendar. To add and change the times on your publishing calendar, go to the Auto Post menu. Once there, select the LinkedIn group you manage and add more scheduling times and days.

Scheduling posts with linkedin

Automate Publishing your Blog Posts

There’s no longer a need to manually share your blog to all of your LinkedIn groups. Set up the automated blog publishing option in Symphony and as soon as you publish your blog posts, it will be shared on LinkedIn. Go to the Auto Post menu and then click on “Blog Syndication” to get started. Select the group/s you want your blog to automatically publish to. You can select to auto-publish to your profile and the groups you’re an admin of.

Add blog to linkedin

auto-publish blog to LinkedIn

Using Symphony to manage your LinkedIn account will change the way you engage with your connections. Start sharing your content with professionals in your field.

Filed Under: Blogging, LinkedIn, User Guide

Adding Your Profiles to Symphony

May 14, 2013 by

The first step to getting started with Symphony is to add the social profiles and blogs that you’d like to manage. Symphony is meant to be an all-in-one social media management dashboard, and it works better the more accounts you connect to it. Here are the types of accounts you can connect:

  • Facebook profiles
  • Facebook business pages
  • Facebook groups (if you’re the group admin)
  • Twitter accounts
  • LinkedIn profile
  • LinkedIn Company Pages
  • Blogs you manage

Symphony will ask for Facebook permissions, including the ability to “post on your behalf”. Don’t worry! Symphony will never post anything unless you tell it to. Once you’re in Symphony you’ll see the home page like this:

how to link your social media profiles to symphony

 

To pick which individual Facebook pages you want to link click the Facebook button (Twitter will connect whichever account you’re currently logged in with). You’ll see a list of your pages appear:

Setup social media profiles with symphony

 

Once you’ve linked your desired profiles, click ‘Done’ and you’ll be taken to the home dashboard for the first time. This is what your profiles will look like:

connect social profiles to manage

If you need to link more profiles, click “Add profiles & blogs.”

Now that you’re set up there’s a few basic tasks you might also want to do:

You’re ready to rock and roll and start harmonizing your social media empire!

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User Guide: Inbox

May 13, 2013 by

We designed Symphony’s inbox with one purpose in mind: to make replying to all your brand mentions and messages as easy as possible. The inbox aggregates all your direct messages, tagged posts, and comments into one feed so you can see the latest conversations on all your pages in one place.

Once you’ve linked your social networks, clicking on inbox will display a chronological feed of all your latest conversations. You can also set up your brand search keywords to see conversations on the social web about your brand that you aren’t directly tagged in. You can also assign tasks for collaborators to respond to, streamlining your team’s workflow.

symphony-inbox-overview

Seeing all your messages at once can get a bit overwhelming, as such there are a variety of filters you can set to select exactly what kinds of conversations you want to see. You can view all messages and mentions for a single social network by selecting that network on the left-hand navigation menu.

If you wish to filter your conversations further, you can click the ‘filters’ tab at the top of the page to see every time of conversation we’re pulling. If you don’t want to see your twitter messages because they’re mostly spam, then filter them out.symphony-tools-inbox-filters

Archiving Posts in the Inbox

The goal with the inbox is to create a streamlined workflow for you or your team.  The ‘Archive’ option was created with this in mind. Once you’ve responded to a post or conversation, you can archive that post to remove it from your inbox feed and save it in the archive. This way your inbox is never cluttered, and you have an easy way to manage your past conversations from all your networks.

The “Make Task” feature enables seamless team workflow so you know who has replied to which conversations, and can easily parse out customer service posts from prospective leads or content marketing posts.

At the end of the day, the inbox is meant to serve your team’s needs. There’s a lot you can do here between filtering and replying to conversations, assigning tasks to teammates, archiving old posts, crossposting, and brand search. If you have any questions or comments on using the inbox, hit us up in the comments!

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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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