If you’ve been out of the office enjoying a nice Christmas holiday and a pleasant New Year, welcome back! Or if you’re like me and you worked through the festivities, welcome to you too! The holidays can easily make you feel out of touch with the newest upgrades and releases of all sorts of fun tools, gadgets, and gizmos – so here at C5 Insight we want to keep you caught up!

A few weeks ago, we talked about the Microsoft Social Engagement 2016 Update 1 and how its new features relate to Marketing.  This update was released in the middle of November 2015, and unveiled some useful new tools. If you’ve felt out of the loop since Thanksgiving, check it out!

And now, MSE has done it again. Right before Christmas, Microsoft rolled out yet another update to Social Engagement to further justify its usefulness for B2B and B2C marketers alike. Read on for the 4 new features that this update has given and how it can help your social media marketing strategy!

This new feature is arguably the best one from the 2016 Update 1.2.  The Custom Sources feature allows you to pull in RSS and Atom feeds simply so you can analyze and understand these feeds on a deeper level.  This new addition is particularly helpful in the Blogs and News side of Social Engagement.  Before this update, the blog and news sources that Social Engagement pulled from was somewhat limited.  All blogs from Tumblr and most from WordPress were covered by Social Engagement, but that meant that most blogs outside of those realms would not be gathered by Social Engagement. Now, you have the power to define the blog or news feed that you specifically want analyzed in Social Engagement.  This update is helpful to marketers in following specifically important sources to their organization or marketing strategy.

2. Publish Posts with Media 

Proactive publishing is already a relatively new feature for MSE (rolled out in the November Update to Social Engagement) and Microsoft has now taken it a step further. The November update allowed us to be able to directly publish tweets or Facebook posts from the Social Center, and now, we can include media in these posts.

Although this may not seem like a huge difference maker in the grand scheme of things, social media marketers know that including images and videos in their posts can make a big difference in drawing viewers in to read and engage with their post.  Including images in your content can increase your page views by 94%, so the real question is, as a marketer, why wouldn’t you use media in your posts, articles, and blogs?  Including media in posts is now one step easier through this added feature in Microsoft Social Engagement.

Knowing what people are saying about your brand, product, etc. on social media is great; knowing who is talking and how they can impact your brand, product, etc. is even better.  With this third update, MSE can now give you information about the authors who are publishing posts about your relevant topics on Twitter.  Information like author location, number of followers, relationships to other accounts that you follow, other tweets they have posted, and reach (a 1-5 scale calculated by Microsoft to suggest the impact of the author’s posts – 1 being no reach/impact, 5 being high reach/impact), .

This access within Social Engagement allows marketers to quickly gather insights on its most influential authors and respond accordingly.  Gaining insights directly from Social Engagement instead of opening Twitter and doing your own research is a quick and easy way to save time and effort for the busy. social media-conscious marketers of today's world.

Last, but not least, we have the Office Groups update.  Instead of assigning posts, streams, alerts, etc. to a single individual, these important facets can now be assigned to teams.  This update widens your ability to respond and increase presence on the social media topics that you designate.  Teams can be configured in Office 365 and then utilized within Social Engagement.  As a marketer, this new feature allows you to designate assignments more easily and stay on top of all of your relevant topics!

Stay tuned for more on Social Engagement as Microsoft continues rolling out updates to this fast-growing tool.  And if you want to know more on how to use Social Engagement in your social media marketing strategy, consider joining us on February 24th for our Deminar of Microsoft Social Engagement for Marketing, Sales, Service, and Research!

And as always, please feel free to Contact Us with any questions.