Social Media Publishing

Please note: This module has been deprecated since 2018 and is removed completely in newer versions.

With the Social Media Publishing app, you can schedule and publish content from Dynamicweb directly to social media channels.

You can:

  • Schedule and publish content directly to Twitter
  • Schedule and publish content to directly Facebook

Social Media Publishing therefore allows you to do conduct even more of your marketing efforts from within Dynamicweb, without having to use external services.

In order for Social Media Publishing to workyou must create an app on the social media platform (Twitter or Facebook). You also need to set up publishing channels in Dynamicweb - read more on that in this article.

To get started with Social Media Publishing:

  • Go to the Marketing area and locate the Social Media Publishing node
  • Click the node to fold out the tool (Figure 1.1)
Figure 1.1 Social Media Publishing tool can be accessed from the Marketing tree

To create a social media message:​

  • Right click on a top folder
  • Click Create new message (Figure 2.1)
Figure 2.1 Creating a new social media message

This opens the Create message view (Figure 2.2). 

Figure 2.2 The Create new social media message view

From here, you can:

  • Name your message – this name is used only as an internal name, in the Social Media app
  • Select or upload an image – if you want to post an image along with your message
  • Supply a link – if you have selected one or more Facebook publishing channels. If you publish to both Facebook and Twitter at the same time, the link will only appear on Facebook.
  • Enter a text – the message you want to post to your channels
  • Select one or more channels to publish to

Twitter has a 140 character limit – if you exceed 140 characters in the text field, posting to Twitter will fail.

You can disable statistics collection on links by checking the checkbox, at the cost of missing out on tracking statistics – this will give you a few more characters to work with.

You can create custom messages for a channel by clicking Create custom message next to the channel on your list of channels. In this way, you do not have to compromise on your content, and only post 140 characters on Facebook, for instance. Instead, create a custom 140 character message for your twitter channels.

Once you have created a message, you probably want to publish it to your channels.

To publish a message click the Publish button - or publish it later using the Schedule message button  (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 The Save and publish and the Schedule message buttons are located right next to each other

Scheduling may be useful, if you want to keep up activity at times when no one is at the office – be it during holidays, weekends, or at night (if you do business in other time zones, or maybe like to target insomniacs).

When scheduling a message:

  • Specify a month, day, year, and time to publish your content
  • Select the appropriate time-zone
  • Click Schedule

Your social media message will now be moved to the Scheduled-folder until it has been sent, after which it will be moved to the Published-folder.

From the published folder, you can get an overview of your social media marketing efforts. For each message, you will be able to see (Figure 5.1):

  • The creation and publication date
  • The message name
  • The channels/media published to
  • A preview of the text
Figure 5.1 The published-folder provides you with a useful overview of your previously published social media messages

A red media/channel icon means that the message was not delivered successfully – you will need to reopen the message by right-clicking on it and selecting edit message, fixing the issue, and clicking Republish.

Selected errors and fixes:

  • Invalid or expired token means that the channel is not authorized or has lost authorization. The channel must be (re)authorized from the settings
  • Status is a duplicate occurs when two identical messages are published in a short timeframe. Messages are checked against recent messages, so that a user cannot submit the same status twice in a row.

On your list of published messages, click a media/channel icon to go to the Statistics overview for that message (Figure 6.1):

Figure 6.1 You have access to statistics regarding your previously published social media messages

Here you can see:

  • Total link clicks – the number of times the link was clicked from all channels
  • Total shares – how many times the content was shared on Facebook or retweeted on Twitter
  • Total reactions – the sum of likes, shares, comments and retweets across channels

You can also see statistics for each individual channel, see a visual representation of the reactions over time, check which particular links were clicked, and see what the message contained for each channel.

The statistics can be exported as a .csv file by clicking Export to CSV

Read more about setting up social media channels in this article.

database

These are the database tables associated with the Social Media Publishing tool:

SocialChannel

Contains setup data for social media channels as defined in Settings -> Marketing -> Social Media PublishingViewId.

Field name Data type Length
ChannelId int 4
ChannelName nvarchar 255
ChannelType nvarchar Max
ChannelParameters nvarchar Max
ChannelCreated datetime 8
ChannelUpdated datetime 8
ChannelActive bit 1

SocialFolder

Contains folder tree structure (FolderId, FolderParentId) under a given topfolder (FolderTopFolderId) in Marketing -> Social Media Publishing.

Field name Data type Length
FolderId int 4
FolderParentId int 4
FolderName nvarchar 255
FolderTopFolderId int 4

SocialMessage

Contains social media messages in a folder (MessageFolderId, MessageTopFolderId).

Field name Data type Length
MessageId int 4
MessageName nvarchar 255
MessageText nvarchar Max
MessageImage nvarchar 255
MessageLink nvarchar 255
MessageLinkId int 4
MessageCreated datetime 8
MessageUpdated datetime 8
MessagePublished datetime 8
MessageDisableParseLinks bit 1
MessageLinkDomain nvarchar Max
MessageFolderId int 4
MessageTopFolderId int 4

SocialPost

Field name Data type Length
PostId int 4
PostMessageId int 4
PostChannelId int 4
PostName nvarchar 255
PostText nvarchar Max
PostImage nvarchar 255
PostLink nvarchar 255
PostCreated datetime 8
PostUpdated datetime 8
PostPublished datetime 8
PostResultSuccess bit 1
PostResultStatusText nvarchar Max
PostResultChannelPostLink nvarchar Max
PostResultChannelPostIdentifier nvarchar Max
PostParsedText nvarchar Max

SocialTask

Contains scheduling data (SocialTaskStartDate) for planned social media postings (SocialTaskMessageId) and their type (SocialTaskType).

Field name Data type Length
SocialTaskId int 4
SocialTaskMessageId int 4
SocialTaskType tinyint 1
SocialTaskActive bit 1
SocialTaskUrl nvarchar 1024
SocialTaskStartDate datetime 8

SocialTopFolder

Contains setup data for a social media publishing top folder. Specifically which channels are enabled (TopFolderChannelIds).

Field name Data type Length
TopFolderId int 4
TopFolderName nvarchar 255
TopFolderChannelIds nvarchar Max