Social Tagging

In an effort to continually empower social marketers with advanced tools for social engagement, we’ve launched a new feature called Social Tagging. This feature allows marketers to identify important members of their social audience — and save audience segments for targeted marketing. Let’s take a look.

Highlight Important Social Users

At Argyle, we realize that you have a flood of social content coming in every day. Tags in Argyle Social allow marketers to easily identify important posts at a glance.

Argyle’s marketing automation integration and tagging feature lets you easily identify posts by customers, prospects, brand advocates, or any additional audience segment you find important.

Identify Social Prospects

Need to remember important information about a social user? You can quickly tag that user and save a note about your interaction with them for future engagement.

Audience Segmentation

Now let’s say you’re launching a campaign to increase your social audience. With Argyle’s social tagging feature, you can easily identify and manage audience segments for targeted social engagement.

We’re really excited to get this new feature into your hands, so contact Argyle Social today to learn more and start a trial.

…until today.

We built Argyle Contacts to help Community Managers and social professionals build stronger customer relationships that drive revenue and retention.  We’re excited to ship the core feature today and look forward to building on this foundation in the coming months.

Much more info below. Let us know what you think!

Argyle Contacts Feature Demo

Manage Your Social Contacts

Argyle automatically populates the new Contacts tab with with people you’ve recently interacted with on Twitter. Every social action in Argyle enriches your contact database – new followers and mentions automatically create new contact records.  All of your social interactions thread together to provide a full conversation history with each contact.

Know Your Audience

The individual contact card provides a comprehensive overview of your relationship and social interactions.  You can augment social history and data with additional information. Write notes to provide additional context to your contacts. Add email address, phone, and other personal information to round out a profile. Look out for exciting integrations in the near future that will augment your social contact with data from your core CRM!

Use Tags To Build Context & Workflow

Context matters in social. Did that last tweet come from a high value customer? A valuable prospect that is in the final stages of the sales process? A customer that has an outstanding high priority ticket? Not knowing could be the difference between a win or a loss, a happy customer or a lost customer.

We integrated tags into Contacts to solve this problem. Use tags to organize your contacts into strategic groups. Tag your largest customers to make sure that you’re keeping tabs on them. Tag strategic influencers and target them with personalized content on a regular basis. Work with your sales team to tag key prospects to ensure that you’re engaging them as they advance through the sales process.

Without further ado…

1. Post photos to Twitter. 

Until now, you’ve been able to post photos to Facebook, but now take your picture-sharing to the Twitter masses!

Use Argyle to share this adorable puppy on Twitter!

2. Native retweets in the Engage tab.

You can now completely mimic Twitter’s retweet functionality through Argyle. Instead of copying the text and placing it in a “RT @XYZ …” format, Argyle will simply place an exact copy of the tweet in your stream, just like twitter.com does.

New retweet interface in Argyle.

The end result!

3. Downloadable CSV reports.

We updated our downloadable campaign and channel reports! Downloadable campaign reports now give a comprehensive look at all data in a campaign. You will see a list of each post in that campaign, along with its content, shortened URL, destination URL, clicks, interactions, conversions, etc.

Your channel reports will give a larger overview of the number of followers, posts and interactions for your properties.

Go crazy for pivot tables with all of the data at your fingertips!

A channel report shows daily metrics for Argyle's Twitter account.

Enjoy! And we really appreciate your thoughts and feedback. Keep it coming over at ideas.argylesocial.com!

The Social Signals API represents the beginning of a new era for Argyle, our customers, and the social media marketing business as a whole.

I’ll tell you a few reasons why.

Social Professionals Have A Massive Blind Spot

The Community Manager’s function is already a cross-functional juggling exercise – a little bit of marketing, a little bit of services, a little bit of sales, and so on.  When done well, strategic social programs should be a part of a business’ core strategic framework, tracking prospect and customer interactions at all stages of their life cycle.

The products that have enabled Community Managers to perform their primary function – including Argyle Social – to date have not aligned with this fragmented reality.  Instead, single-function social media management products have created functional silos and – as a result – massive data management problems.  Most Community Managers get by with swivel chair product “integrations” and multi-spreadsheet copy/paste marathons.

Social has emerged as a critical business function, yet it remains fragmented across systems, spreadsheet, and people.  And marketers are flying blind as a result.

We wrote about this “blind spot” problem at length in our newest whitepaper – “If You Teach A Community Manager To Fish”.  You can download the social marketing automation whitepaper here.

Argyle Routes Social Into Your Org’s Central Nervous System

Argyle’s Social Signals API resolves the blind spot problem by routing social data directly into your organization’s central nervous system: the customer database.

In short, we’ve built technology that takes all of those social marketing touchpoints – clicks, likes, retweets, shares, comments, conversions, etc. – and maps them to the individual contact.  The Signals API then makes this data accessible to your business systems.

This technology bridges the gap between your business systems and your social media marketing efforts.  Your “single view of the customer” can now include social activity history.

To avoid over-sharing all of the nerdy marketing details, I’ll just show you a picture of the Social Signals API and how it works:

Social Data Drives Smarter Marketing

So what are the implications of a non-blind-spot, social-data-integrated world?

Here are a few scenarios for your considerations:

• You can map social directly to revenue.  You can have a monthly pipeline conversation with your Dir of Marketing and Dir of Sales in which you can point out the exact leads, prospects, and opportunities that have had social touchpoints.
• You can build targeted email campaigns that trigger off of social activities.  For example, a customer may interact with brand offsite on social, but has not interacted onsite in the last 3 months.  You can target this customer with an email offer to drive onsite action.
• You can target custom offers to site visitors on their first visit.  For example, a visitor’s first interaction with your brand may occur on social.  When they visit your site, you will already have information about their activity history and can target offers accordingly.

Integration Will Drive the Next Phase of Social Business Innovation

The drive for integration in our business is undeniable.  The Community Manager’s fragmented job responsibilities obviously require it.  The tenets of effective, integrated digital marketing require it.  Argyle Social enables it.

The companies that successfully integrate social throughout their organization, organize themselves to programmatically capture key social data, and then leverage this data to make smarter marketing decisions will be the companies that win big.

We’re excited to roll out these exciting products and look forward to building on these foundations in the coming months and years.

Let me know what you think.  And let me know if I can be helpful!

Eric

Jill @ Argyle.

——

Argyle Social today announced two significant enhancements to its social media marketing platform. The new products – the Social Signals API and Argyle for Salesforce.com – enable community managers and social professionals to integrate social data across marketing channels and business systems.

“When it comes to enterprise marketing maturity, social media is light years behind other channels like email, search, and display,” Argyle Social CEO Eric Boggs said. “As a result, marketers operate in a dangerous blind spot – they don’t understand how their social media investments map to key business outputs.”

“We believe that the cross-channel integration enabled by our new products will drive the next wave of social business innovation,” Boggs added.

Social Signals API

Argyle’s Social Signals API maps activity data like social interactions, short URL clicks, shares and website conversions to individual contact records and social profiles. This powerful social data feed augments customer intelligence and enriches cross-channel marketing programs.

“The days of fragmented social data and swivel-chair integrations are over. The days of social business automation are here,” Boggs said. “Our Social Signals API provides a contact-centric data feed to augment CRM, email marketing and customer service systems with social data. As a result, marketing executives can run smarter marketing programs and make socially-informed business decisions.”

Argyle for Salesforce.com

Argyle also announced a plug-and-play Salesforce.com integration – the first of many products to be built on its Social Signals API.

“Argyle for Salesforce is a revolutionary step forward for the B2B community manager,” Boggs said.  “We expect to announce integrations with additional CRM and email marketing systems in the very near future.”

Argyle’s Salesforce.com integration maps social activity data directly into Salesforce Lead and Contact records and highlights the community manager’s role as a sales enabler and revenue accelerator.

Customer Quote

“By tying directly into the CRM, Argyle surfaces which leads, opportunities, and sales have had social touchpoints in ways that you can’t with other tools like Google Analytics that stop once the customer leaves your website,” said Argyle customer Christopher Penn, Director of Inbound Marketing at email marketing software provider WhatCounts.

“More social data in the sales funnel gives sales and marketing teams the ability to follow up with prospective customers via social channels,” Penn added.

New and Improved Post Report—Now with Facebook Insights!

Data-driven marketers are gleaning information from Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and their trusty Argyle Social reports. We’ve cut out one more step for you by pulling Facebook Insights into Argyle. Now, you can see the reach, viral impressions, people talking about this, as well as like and comments per post. Check out the screen shots below to see the beautiful rendering of Insights data in a clean, pretty Argyle fashion.

Want to know what posts are generating the most buzz on Twitter? The new post report also will help you there, too. It shows interaction metrics for all Twitter posts so you can easily see what posts generated the most conversation. It also presents that conversation history to you in-line so that you can see exactly what responses a particular post generated.

Track Your Social Shares

Social media marketers are forever chasing the answer to the eternal question “How is social moving the needle for my business?”. Argyle Social now helps you answer that question even better with our new social shares feature.

There are two primary types of social activity: things you post, and things other people post about you. Argyle has always done a great job tracking the performance and the impact of things you post. But we’re now also tracking things that other people post about you via the share buttons on your website and blog.

This will give marketers a more holistic view of the value that social media is creating. Every link shared via an Argyle share button will track a share count, as well as the number of clicks and conversions that these shares have generated.

Do you know how much value your advocates are creating for you?

Google+ Integration

In your engage tab, along with keeping up with all the latest conversations about your brand, search terms, and competitors, you can now import the news feed from Google Plus pages. Whether you’re a full G+ convert, slowly trying it out, or just getting started, this new integration will make sure you’re keeping up with chatter on G+.

We asked Stacey, one of our talented developers, to give you a quick overview.

You call the shots

Hopper allows you to set multiple rules throughout the week, so you can fine-tune your social media posting schedule to maximize engagement. Do you have an office in Sydney and San Francisco? Durham, NC and Durham, England? Set multiple rules on your hopper so you publish seven posts from 9-5 in SF and another seven from 9-5 in Sydney. (If you would like to learn more about timing your social media posts, check out our infographic.)

Create multiple hoppers

Do you manage properties for multiple audiences and market segments? Create multiple hoppers that are tailored to your communities like never before. Think of them as buckets. If you post different content to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, Hopper allows you to create multiple buckets. But don’t fret; hoppers still play by the same permission-based system you set up initially. That way, only authorized users can post to hoppers that have been approved by the administrator.

One-click bookmarklet

Curating amazing content is hard enough on its own and our one-click bookmarklet makes posting to your properties easier than ever. Use the bookmarklet to “send to Hopper” with one click and you’re done. It really is that simple.

Email alerts

Once your hopper has a nice long queue of posts, it functions as the well-oiled machine we designed it to be. If your hopper reaches the end of its list, it will send you an email letting you know that your hopper is empty. Think of it as the gas light in your car. Time to fill up.

Which tool, when?

The Hopper works great for some tasks whereas scheduled posts may be better for others. Learn how to choose the right social media tool for the job in our just-released white paper.

Post Assignment allows you to integrate your social media strategy across departments. With it, you can loop in teammates, say on the customer service or product design teams, so that your responses are quick, helpful, and meaningful.

Assign Posts

You simply choose the post you want to assign from your waterfall dashboard to notify anyone in your account that a post needs their attention.

Steer the Conversation

Once you’ve assigned the post, you can add a message to explain what action is required.

Track Assignments

That teammate can then hop back into the application and track which messages have been assigned, reassign the post to another user, and view the history of the post.

Community managers shouldn’t go it alone! Connect your efforts seamlessly to the rest of your organization with Post Assignment.

Let us introduce you to our new and improved Engage tab. We call it Waterfall. It’s a multi-column tool (à la TweetDeck), but optimized for business use. Highlights include: follow and unfollow people, pop-up alerts, easily view rich posts and track links and campaigns in each of your responses. All in the same easy-to-use Argyle interface you already love.

Will you continue to use multiple social media tools to manage your social presence? Not if we have anything to say about it.

Multi-Column Layout

The new multi-column layout allows you to interact with followers who are engaging with you, listen in on conversations relevant to your brand and pull in your Twitter lists for more monitoring power.

Facebook Searches

Keep up with what people are saying about your brand by searching public profiles. Save your search in a column so you can always be sure to see what’s being talked about.

In-Context Post Metrics

We’ve made it easy to see how each post is contributing to your social media goals. Simply click on the post and you will see the clicks, conversions and value from that post – right in the Engage tab!

New Social Media Insights Dashboard

Have you ever felt like your were drowning in the social stream? We all have. Content creation, content curation, replying to customers and prospects, reporting KPIs for your boss… It’s a mission-critical treadmill that you can’t get off.

Because social media is so time-consuming, it’s important to get your head out of the weeds every once in a while and really evaluate your performance against your goals. We call this semi-regular evaluation your social media review. It’s a little like your yearly physical, but without having to bend over and cough.

Since we know you’re busy, we’ve pulled together the data and done most of the work for you. Our brand new dashboard is a completely new look at your social data. When your account switches over to the new dashboard, you’ll see a screen that looks like this:

This dashboard gives you an overview of four key social media metrics – conversions, clicks, interactions and followers. And you can see how these four numbers change from one period to the next – week to week, month to month, etc.

Once you have a general idea of how things are going, you can dig deeper. Let’s say you’re interested in the amount of traffic your links have been generating. After a quick look at the main dashboard to see your click count, clicks per follower, etc., you can uncover more insight into this data.

You will find the campaigns with the biggest change from the previous time period to the current one. This allows you to see which types of content are performing exceptionally well and which have lost the most ground. Each of the four main metrics on the dashboard break down into these types of actionable insights–they tell what you’re doing right and wrong and how to get the best results possible.

New Social Media Review Whitepaper

Thinking through your social media review can be a daunting task at first. That’s why we put together a shiny new white paper, “How to Do a Social Media Review.” It explains the way Argyle conducts social media reviews and how you can think through the process yourself.

Could you ask for more?

Why, yes. Yes you could.

Data Driven Social Media Webcast with Jason Falls

Join us on Thursday, August 4 at 1 p.m. EST for our webinar “Data Driven Social Media Management”. Argyle CEO Eric Boggs and Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer will be discussing how to use numbers to inform your social strategy.

So, look out for the new dashboard. Read the white paper. Sign up for the webinar. It’s going to be the perfect storm of social media analysis, and we can’t wait.