How to: Use Workflow Features to Get the Most From Your SMM

Social media is fast becoming a business-wide activity, no longer just confined to a few social media managers or community managers.

In the most progressive social businesses, every department is using social in order to enhance their activities, from the customer service department using Twitter to respond to customers, to sales teams finding social leads, to product development teams using social media data to conduct market research.

In order to do so, businesses are increasingly turning to enterprise monitoring tools and solutions (just like us) to capture the social media conversations and data they need to fully function as a social business.

Workflow options are vital in these situations to make sure the right people are seeing the right conversations and that mentions are being dealt with by the correct department, ensuring smooth and efficient workflow management.

At Brandwatch, we have a range of workflow options that allow different staff members and teams to route through mentions to each other, see the status of them and keep on top of what’s going on.

Here’s a guide to using different workflow features effectively:

Assignment
Our clients get unlimited users as standard, so many of the brands and agencies using our platform have multiple users (sometimes over 100). They need to be able to route conversations through to the right people.

The assignment functionality allows you to assign a specific mention to another user within your organisation. They’ll be able to see these mentions within their dashboard, and can also receive an email letting them know it has been assigned to them.

The classic use for this is to assign specific mentions to members of a community or customer service team, in order to share the workload and make sure mentions get responded to.

However, it can also be used to share information across teams; for example, if a message is related to product feedback, this can be assigned to a member of the product team so they are alerted it.

This way, you can make sure everyone in your business is benefiting from the insights and information available through social media monitoring.

---

Status
This allows you to assign a status to a mention so that others can see whether it’s being dealt with and so you can keep track of your open items.

You can assign a mention as open, pending or closed, making sure that everyone in your team knows whether a mention has been dealt with.

This avoids duplication of work, ensures a seamless response to online queries and also allows for reporting on how your teams are performing in terms of responding to mentions.

---

Priority
Priority allows you to mark your mention as high, medium or low priority.

Some mentions are likely to be more important than others.

Got a particularly irate customer or an influential tweeter posting about your brand? Chances are you want to deal with the mention quickly, so you can use this feature to mark it as high priority, so you and your team know to deal with it before other less time-sensitive mentions.

In turn, this helps avoid potential crises and lets your team work more efficiently.

---

Checked
The checked – yes/no – option allows you to mark that mentions have been checked and assigned as they come in; particulatly useful for community management or those on the front line filtering mentions as they come in.

This is also useful if you are doing manual mark up – say for categorisation or checking sentiment – so that you can keep track of which mentions have been reviewed.

---

It doesn’t stop there…

 

There are also other features with Brandwatch that can help with effective workflow management:

Stars, tags and categories

The star option – available when looking at a single mention or for mentions in bulk – allows you to quickly mark mentions that are of particular interest or to build a list of favourite mentions.

If the star isn’t enough, tags and categories allow for more customisation and allow you to bucket mentions – either individually or in bulk – into categories and sections that make sense for you. You can read all about tagging and categorisation here.

---

Notes
Brandwatch has a ‘notes’ function on individual mentions. This allows team members to write notes that might be useful for others, or to keep track of their own tasks, that relate to that specific mention.

For example, you might note that the author of the mention is influential, or that the issue is being looked into.

The notes section also shows a history of the mention, for example when it is assigned to someone, meaning an easy-to-view record of how the mention has been dealt with.

---

Rules 
In Brandwatch, you can set up your own bespoke rules to apply any of these tags, priorities or assignments automatically, saving on the manual work you have to do.

You can do this by searching within your query for specific phrases, or by automating it based on all manner of filters.

You can read all about rules here.

---

Charting

You can also chart all of these options, so that you can analyse workflow performance and status. For example, you could analyse who is assigned the most mentions, who has closed the most mentions, what percentage of mentions are still open and so on.

These workflow features also come in handy with integrations with other platforms – for example, our recent integration with HootSuite means that these workflow features can be seen and edited seamlessly in both systems, meaning easy workflow management at both the listening and the social media management/engagement stages.

Pretty handy stuff eh?

Find out more

 

Brandwatch users can find out more about how to use workflow features in our support portal here.

Not a Brandwatch user but yearning for more information about workflow features (plus all the other great stuff we do)? Get in touch.

 

---