#rallydeck

Rallyverse has recently added a third social network to its roster of publishing destinations: LinkedIn.

Now, Rallyverse users can share updates from their RallyDeck directly to LinkedIn, and take advantage of everything that Rallyverse has to offer, including shortened links (for performance tracking), hashtags, and, of course, fresh, relevant content for you to edit and share.

  Publishing to LinkedIn with Rallyverse is easy. Just log in to your account and look for the link in the top right corner of your RallyDeck that's inviting you to connect to LinkedIn. Once you click through and authorize your account, each item in your RallyDeck will now feature a LinkedIn icon:

To publish that message to LinkedIn, just click on the "in" icon to toggle it to blue:

Simple enough, right? We also allow you to select Linkedin as a publishing destination in the composer box at the top of the page:

Welcome back from the summer.  If you haven't been following our blog posts this summer you have missed out on a lot of new features and capabilities that we have released.  

So we have a quick summary for you. Just click on the image below and you can see our September Newsletter.  

Our mission at Rallyverse is to show our clients what to share and when to share it in social media.  And our clients aren't shy in giving us the feedback - which we love and turn into new features for them.  Clients were asking for more control and visibility on approved and pending items, they wanted better performance and easier to get more content if they wanted it.  So we gave it to them.  

We rolled out those changes to the RallyDeck this morning that are designed to make publishing great content to Twitter and Facebook even faster and easier than before. 

What's new? 

Organize your approved and pending posts. Now when you approve content for publishing, it zooms up to the top RallyDeck into a separate queue for approved items only. You can expand and hide both the approved and pending sections of the RallyDeck, and each will display their current number of items contained within them. 

Paging through your RallyDeck. When you log into your RallyDeck or refresh the page, we will only show your top 40 pending posts. However, if you want to dig deeper into the queue, just hit the Show More button at the bottom of the page and we'll bring you your next 40 results. 

New buttons and colors for Approved and Pending posts. To toggle a post between Pending and Approved states, just click on the score button (which conveniently reads "Approved" or "Pending" -- we previously just used colors to denote the state). 

Link Previews Inline. We've removed the "Preview Link" in the footer of each item and have simply hyperlinked the URL contained in the content item (complete with blue underline).

We've got a lot more updates and improvements coming over the next month. Please contact us at [email protected] if you have any questions or comments about the new features -- we'd love to hear from you.

If you're anything like us (or most of the folks that we talk to here at Rallyverse), your feelings about managing your social media presence can something be like your feelings about flossing: we know it's good for us, we do, and we wish we did it more often, but we usually end up skipping it and and/ or spending too little time doing a half-hearted job (that our colleagues and followers notice).   

Sigh. 

So why don't we do a better job managing our social media presence? Because doing social right is a hard, time-intensive task. It takes time to find great stuff to share. It takes even more time to come up with an original point of view or comment on that great stuff to share (since just posting links tends to leave your social media friends and followers a bit unsatisfied). And even if you can carve out the time to pull together some thoughtful posts, you end up sending them all at the same time, leaving you with a decidedly non-optimal flurry of posts at a single point in the day, and then silence the rest of the day. How can you expect to be a relevant participant in social media and still tackle the 50 other things on your to-do list for the day?

Don't worry. Rallyverse can help.

With the RallyDeck's automated scheduling features, you can manage you or your brand's social media presence in 15 minutes a day. How? Three easy steps.

1. Block Time And Create A Routine

Sourcing new and interesting content is hard and takes time. Luckily, we have done some of the heavy lifting for you with the RallyDeck. So set aside some time every day -- we recommend the morning but late at night also works. Pro tip: we have clients that do all their content on Monday and check in for 5-10 minutes during the week. Block it on your calendar, minimize your email -- whatever you need to do to focus.

2. Review And Approve 

Log into the RallyDeck and start reviewing the recommended content. We give you roughly 40 ready to share posts so you just have to select the ones you like and edit them.  Remember that sharing is human: adding your point of view or, even better, your brand's voice makes content more engaging to your audience. After you've made some edits inline, save the post; be sure to make sure your publishing destination is correct. If you like your post you can click to publish or, better yet, approve the post by clicking the score. You will note that the score changes colors.  

An approved post means that you are done editing the post and it is now approved for publishing.  You can always edit an approved post, you just need to approve it again once you are complete.  The key to making this work for you is approving your posts for the day. The right frequency for publishing on Twitter and Facebook varies by marketer but a general rule of thumb is 5-7 per day on Twitter and 1-2 per day on Facebook. So you need roughly 6-9 approved items to make this work for you. Pro tip: Great marketers put in their core messages once a week for repeat campaign items: sales, offers, e-mail registrations, etc).

3. Advanced Real-Time Scheduling

Once you've gotten your items edited and approved, your next step is turning on auto-publishing. You can do that right in the RallyDeck, or you can go into the Settings page and adjust your frequency (1 post every 45 minutes, 2 posts every 60 minutes, whatever works for you). Pro tip: Most marketers set it at 1 post every 90 minutes during peak hours of the day.

And from there, you should be good to go. Every time your account is scheduled to send a post, Rallyverse will review and score all of your approved posts -- based on what's trending at that exact moment -- and publish the post with the highest score. That way, you can be sure you're sending out the most relevant content at any given moment, without having to manually schedule the posts yourself (which entails trying to predict what will be the right thing to say six hours in the future). 

As part of the launch of Rallyverse earlier this month, we’ve launched a slew of new features and capabilities. Not to mention a really sleek UI. Over the next few days, we’ll be releasing a series of blog posts introducing the new elements of our product and service. See Part 1: The RallyDeck here, Part 2: Automated Publishing and Part 3: Account Hierarchy here. This is…

Part 4: Optimizing Your Account

In our earlier posts, we've introduced the RallyDeck, shared some details on how to set up automated publishing, and walked through the Rallyverse Account Hierarchy. Now that we've shared details on the basics of Rallyverse, we'd like to offer some tips and tricks on how to optimize your account. 

The RallyDeck offers each of our clients a customized list of ready-to-send posts and Tweets that are scored and ranked based on their relevance to the conversations happening in social media in real time. But while the RallyDeck is able to tailor results to the objectives of each client, that doesn't mean that all of our clients will use the RallyDeck the same way.

For example, some clients use social media to demonstrate thought leadership by discussing and amplifying stories and topics that are breaking right now. Others use social media to drive traffic to their owned and operated content assets, posting evergreen content items from their archives when they match current topics and trends. And others -- especially those with a specific geographic presence -- mix content from a national brand with interesting local news and content.

Don't worry. Rallyverse can help. 

We'll walk through each of the three examples above and share some tips for how to best optimize the Rallyverse settings to deliver the best results for your business.

1. Thought Leadership. For clients focused on thought leadership, talking about news that's (a) breaking right now and (b) is relevant to a broad set of users is of the utmost importance. Thought leaders wouldn't be caught dead posting something from last week, let alone last year. And they're willing to hop on macro-level trends, even if those trends aren't directly related to their business. 

For these clients, we recommend the following configuration on the Settings page:

Ranking by Trends will focus the results on items that are trending broadly, and not necessarily tailored to the likes and preferences of the client. High relevance will return only results that match specific trend topics that are defined and published by one of our sources of third-party trend data (we use a number of different providers). And Limit feed results to last 24 hours will make sure that you only see recently published items -- and not yesterday's news (or at least not yesterday morning's news). 

2. Driving Traffic To Evergreen Content. For clients interested in driving traffic to their own content, chasing global trends isn't necessarily a priority. Rather, these clients hope to match their existing content and assets to trending conversations among their fans and followers. They have a ton of great content -- they just want to make sure they're promoting it at the right time.

For these clients, we recommend the following configuration on the Settings page:

Ranking by Trends and Relevance will focus the results on items that match accelerating conversations and relate to the client's stated interests and likes. Leaving Limit feed results to last 24 hours unchecked will allow the Rallyverse engine to source content from the client's archives that matches current conversations. 

3. Mixing Brand and Local Content. For clients that are looking to mix branded corporate content with local flavor, our recommendation is to focus on your feeds and your Ranking settings. For the feeds, be sure to sprinkle in a fair number of local sources (30-40 percent of your total feeds) -- this will allow Rallyverse to recommend content that fits both your brand ambitions and your local marketing objectives. 

We also recommend the same configuration as the marketers interested in promoting their own content:

As part of the launch of Rallyverse last weekend, we’ve launched a slew of new features and capabilities. Not to mention a really sleek UI. Over the next few days, we’ll be releasing a series of blog posts introducing the new elements of our product and service. See Part 1: The RallyDeck here and Part 2: Automated Publishing here. This is…

Part 3: Account Hierarchy

In Part 1, we introduced the RallyDeck and gave you an overview of how it works. In Part 2, we described how you can use the RallyDeck to automate the way you publish Facebook posts and Tweets. In Part 3, we're changing speeds and introducing our new method for organizing your social media presences and sharing work with other members of your team: the Rallyverse account hierarchy. 

Many of our clients -- both large marketers and agencies -- have complex brand hierarchies and teams working to support those brands in social media. Managing, tracking and reporting on who and what those teams do in social media is really hard. But don't worry, Rallyverse can help.  

The Rallyverse account hierarchy is designed to help marketers and agencies easily...

Add and manage new brand or client personas;

Add and manage team members to work on each of those brand and client personas;

View aggregate reporting across the client or agency organization;

Report on the performance of different accounts and profiles;

Report on the performance of individual team members;

Track actions of team members for compliance and auditing purposes.

With that in mind, we created a simple, three-level hierarchy that allows marketers and agencies to easily manage multiple accounts and divide responsibilities for those accounts among members of their team:

Organization

An Organization is a collection of Profiles and Users that maintains many-to-many access rights to data and publishing.

Examples of an organization may include a marketer with multiple products and social media presences or an agency that managers multiple client accounts. 

Profile

A profile is distinct publishing entity that posts unique content to Facebook and/ or Twitter via the RallyDeck. Each profile has its own set of content sources and its own queue of pending and approved content items in the RallyDeck. A profile can only be associated with a single Twitter account, but can publish to multiple Facebook pages that are managed by a single Facebook user (that is, all the Facebook pages to which that user had admin rights). A profile can only belong to one organization, but can have multiple users.

Examples of Profiles include individual Twitter or Facebook presences (@Rallyverse, @gabe_bevilacqua). 

Users

A user is an individual with a distinct login and a set of associated management and publishing rights within an organization. Each user logs in with a distinct email address and password. Users can access multiple profiles. Note that in order to manage the access to each Profile within an Organization, the Organization Admin User (at least one per Organization) can assign each user to the appropriate Profiles within Rallyverse.

Make sense? Let's take a look at a simplified example for a hypothetical social media marketer, Social Media Co:

Social Media Co. is a leading social media marketer. They maintain two different Twitter and Facebook presences: one handle focuses on industry news (@SocialMediaNews) and the other focuses on deals and offers (@SocialMediaDeals). They have four employees who work on these accounts: Joe, Gabe, Guy and Jason. 

In this example, the Organization is “Social Media Co.” Under it, there are two Profiles, @SocialMediaNews and @SocialMediaDeals. Finally, there are four Users, Joe, Gabe, Guy, and Jason. Note that in the example above, Joe and Gabe work on @SocialMediaNews, and Guy, Jason, and Gabe have access to @SocialMediaDeals — meaning that Gabe is able to access both Profiles via his login. 

Simple enough, right? Now let's look at a slightly more complex example:

Joe's Donuts is a leading coffee and donut shop with local donut shops across the US. They maintain 21 different Twitter and Facebook presences: one for corporate (@JoeDonutsHQ) and one for each of their top 20 markets (@JoesDonutsNYC, @JoesDonutsPhilly, etc). They have four employees who work on these accounts: Joe, Sally, Sara, Tim and the local franchise marketing lead for each DMA. 

In this example, the Organization is "Joe's Donuts." Under it, there are 21 Profiles (only 3 are shown), @JoeDonutsHQ, @JoeandDonutsNYC, @JoesDonutsPhilly, etc. Finally, there are 25 Users (only 6 shown): Joe, Sally, Sarah, Tim and the managers of each of the local franchises. Note that in the example above, each of the four users who work on the @JoeDonutsHQ account can also work on the local accounts.   

As part of the launch of Rallyverse last weekend, we’ve launched a slew of new features and capabilities. Not to mention a really sleek UI. Over the next few days, we’ll be releasing a series of blog posts introducing the new elements of our product and service. See Part 1: The RallyDeck here. This is…

Part 2: Automated Publishing

In Part 1, we introduced the RallyDeck and gave you an overview of how it works. We shared details on creating and editing posts, publishing and deleting, and sorting your queue. But there was one major feature in the RallyDeck that we didn't discuss: automated publishing. 

Try as we all might, it can be challenging to maintain an always-on social media presence, especially when it comes to sourcing and sharing fresh content. While social media never stops, most of us are (at least occasionally) required to step away from our screens and do boring things like attend meetings, talk to our customers and partners, interact with family members, and sleep. Even if we set aside some time each day to manage our accounts, it can be awkward to blast out a clump of 5-6 tweets or posts at once. 

Don't worry -- Rallyverse can help. 

The RallyDeck allows you to queue up a set of approved posts for automated delivery at a later time. By clicking on the score of an individual content item and toggling that score button from gray to green, you've set the post to "Approved." 

You can approve as many posts as you like, and you're free to edit and update posts that you've already approved. And, if you change your mind about an approved post, you can always just click the score and toggle it back to pending (the button will go back to gray). 

In order to begin automated publishing, you'll need to go to your settings page and configure the volume and frequency of your automated posts. On the settings page, be sure to first check the box for both "Auto-publish" and "Only auto-publish approved items."

Note that if you check only "Auto-publish" without "Only auto-publish approved items" the RallyDeck will automatically publish unapproved items, and could potentially post things you haven't even seen. 

The final step in automating your publishing is setting your publishing volume and frequency. While other tools force users to set a specific time for each post to be published, the RallyDeck uses its algorithmic assessment of which approved post is most relevant at the time of publishing to determine what to post -- you just need to tell it how many items you'd like to post at a time and how often you'd like those items to be posted.

In the example above, the RallyDeck will post a maximum of two items every 45 minutes -- and the two that it will publish will be the posts with the highest RallyRank score at the time of publishing. Note that the RallyRank score is updated in real time to make sure that we're always serving up the most relevant content for your fans and followers.