If you haven’t completely hopped on the social media marketing train – you should probably get on it.  Whether your company is B2B or B2C, social media is gaining an increasing amount of relevance in today’s marketing world, and research suggests that it will only increase in prevalence as this wide world grows and develops.  With this marketing platform growing and changing the way marketers reach new clients and customers, more and more time and resources are being invested into social media marketing.  Today’s marketers need a tool to monitor all of their social media activity in one place.  They need a way to monitor and filter new prospects and reach out to them when the time is right.  They need a way to keep tabs on competitors who are also running social media campaigns. And the list goes on.

And this is where Microsoft Social Engagement comes in.  If you’re asking the question “What is Microsoft Social Engagement?” – click that link to read a blog we wrote on Microsoft Social Engagement and some of its exciting, fundamental features.  Once you’re done with that (or if you’ve been with me the whole time here) read below to hear about the best new features and functionalities Microsoft just rolled out in the November update to Social Engagement and how they could benefit your company.

Before November, you could not proactively publish a post from within Microsoft Social Engagement – you could only respond to others’ posts.  Now, however, within the Social Center, you can pull out the “Publish” tab and type up a post from a variety of accounts (depending on what accounts you have already linked to Social Engagement) and publish it to either Facebook or Twitter.  Originally, there was a whisper about being able to add media to these posts such as pictures, videos, etc.; however, that functionality is yet to be seen.

Whether you’re B2B or B2C, this update points to the direction that Microsoft is heading with its investment in Microsoft Social Engagement, which is allowing you to do more things in one place.  Instead of having to toggle from one window to look at what people are saying in Social Engagement to another window with your Twitter or Facebook account open, you can simply publish straight from Microsoft Social Engagement.  This simple change can also serve as a simple time saver for social-media-conscious marketers.

Dynamics CRM already allows the ability to link a post to Dynamics CRM to create a record as either a lead or case.  This functionality is beneficial to monitor leads and cases that come in through the various social media platforms supported in MSE.  With the most recent update, Microsoft has taken it a step farther.  Now, you can filter posts from social media based on if there is already a linked record in CRM matching the post or the author of the post.

Being able to filter posts to determine what has been linked to CRM and what hasn’t is huge for smart marketing practice.  Viewing posts that are already linked to records in CRM will give you insight into how long the author of this post has been in your records, how often they post about your relevant topic, and if they are a viable prospect.  Viewing posts that do not have any record in CRM will give you insight into an ocean of posts written by people who are not in your records.  These are fresh new prospects that are essentially untouched by you and your organization.  This ability to filter posts based on their link to CRM offers a way to get additional valuable views of the authors of relevant topics on your monitored social media platforms with minimal effort from the user.

In addition to proactive publishing and CRM record filtering, Microsoft has rolled out a few more minor updates and changes to MSE that are worth noting:

1. Social Center now only shows posts from the last 14 days.– This change was put in place in an effort to speed up the loading process for streams within Social Center. However, you can still load posts from up to the past month in Analytics.
   
2. Widgets and pages in MSE will now load faster.– Thanks to some migrations and upgrades to critical performance pieces, MSE will now load quicker than before.
   
3. Turkish is now available. – This addition may be more significant to some users than others, but gathering posts from social media, the UI of MSE, and sentiment calculation will all support the Turkish language.
   
4. MSE now uses Microsoft Translator (API) for better language detection. – Simply put, Microsoft Translator (API) will provide better language detection for all languages supported by Bing.

Why does this matter for my business/me?