Social Media Management in ACT!

So far we have explored 4 free online tools that you can implement to ACT! using the Web Info tab. In our fourth and final post for this series we will explore different ways for implementing and managing social media in ACT!

Social Media Management with Hootsuite

Hootsuite is an online dashboard tool that collaborates all of your social networks in one place. Within Hootsuite you can monitor your social feeds, schedule posts to your social media accounts and report on social media performance.

Learn more about Hootsuite and sign up for a free account on their website www.hootsuite.com

How to implement it to ACT!

1. Simply create a new Web Info link that looks like this: “http://www.hootsuite.com” 
2. The first time you click on the Web Info link you will be asked to log in to Hootsuite – once you’ve done this you can use Hootsuite as you normally would from within ACT! The result will look something like this: 

Viewing Social Media Profiles in ACT!

In the latest hotfix release for ACT! 2013 the Social Updates tab was introduced. This tab is a great way for businesses to view and interact with their contacts’ social media profiles from within ACT!

The key feature of this new tool is the “Remember this page” button. Users simply search for the right profile within each platform and click this button to save the profile.

At the moment the Social Updates tab only supports Facebook and LinkedIn – so if you want to view your ACT! contacts social media profiles from other platforms (such as Twitter) or if you’re not ready to update to ACT! 2013 there is a workaround available.

How to implement it to ACT!

1. Create new fields in ACT! called “LinkedIn Profile”, “Twitter Profile” etc. 
2. Create new links in the Web Info tab using the URL Snippet plus Merge Tag method*. For example: “http://www.linkedin.com/{LinkedIn Profile}”, “ http://www.twitter.com/{Twitter Profile}” etc. 
3. Find your contacts’ social media profiles and copy/paste the relevant URL snippet into the corresponding fields in ACT! The result would look like this:

*Alternatively you could just use the merge tags for the Web Info links and copy/paste the entire URL to these fields rather than the snippets. Just be careful that the URL’s don’t exceed the character limits on your ACT! fields.


That’s it for this blog series – we’d love to know if you have implemented any of our ideas and how successful they have been. Post your comments below.