This article presents the basic understanding of Social Engagement Application logic and Social Engagement Analytics along with the conceptual approaches to help you start working with various Social Engagement features and areas. You’ll get an idea about common Social Engagement UI elements and useful tips to work efficiently with Microsoft Social Engagement.

Prerequisites

To provide you with the best experience with Social Engagement, it’s a good idea to keep your browser updated to the latest version.

• Supported browsers
  • At least Internet Explorer 11
  • At least latest version of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari
• Supported mobile devices
  • Windows Phone 8 and Windows Phone 8.1 devices with Internet Explorer mobile
  • iPhone and Apple iPad running at least iOS 7 with Apple Safari browser
  • Phones and Tablets running at least Android 4.2 with Google Chrome Mobile browser

Sign in to Social Engagement

To utilize Social Engagement, you must have an Office 365 subscription and be set up as a Social Engagement user by your Office 365 Administrator. This implies that your organization also needs to have a license for Social Engagement.

Navigate the Application’s Main Areas

Use the navigation bar at the top of the page to move between all of the different areas of the MS Social Engagement. Pages that you see rely on the permissions that your system administrator assigned to you.

The navigation controls are as follows:

• Application launcher: Quickly go to your MS Office 365 portal and select from your available services.
• Open default page: Start a fresh analysis on Social Engagement Analytics > Overview and reset all active filters.
• Navigation: Click this button to see the Social Engagement Application areas and quickly switch to the area that you are looking for.
• Sign out or Change Profile: You can now change your profile by clicking the View Office 365 profile option or Sign out from Social Engagement and your Office 365 user account.
• User options: Get the one-click access to the My Preferences.
• Help options: Look for context-sensitive help topics that apply to the area you’re working in, and quickly access the Social Engagement forums and support contacts.
• Application areas: This is the main areas to work in Social Engagement.
• Search Set-up: Edit or create search topics, defining the posts that Social Engagement acquires. Get a Social Engagement overview of your solution’s data acquisition status and its progress towards the post quota.
• Analytics: Look into widgets that will show the data in your solution. Switch between different pages in Social Engagement Analytics to see more detailed information about the areas that matter the most to you.
• Private Messages: Find every private messages in the solution with a single click. This is not a Social Engagement Application but a shortcut to a view on the post list with the filter for private messages enabled.
• Social Center: Manage and create real-time streams of posts that match a selected data set.
• Activity Maps: Manage and create and activity maps to see real-time visualizations of posts with location information.
• Social Selling: Work with the Social Selling Assistant specifically from within the MS Social Engagement and get recommendations on relevant and shareable content that really matters to you.
• Alerts: Manage and create alerts to get the most recent posts or significant changes delivered by email to the specified recipients.
• Settings: All users can define how the Social Engagement Application displays for them. Administrators can able to manage user roles, set system-wide settings, and configure many more options.

Get Around in the Analytics Area

In several cases, the first thing you’ll see when you sign in to Social Engagement is the Home page. If you don’t have any search topics set up yet, you’ll be guided to create topic. If another user already created search topics, you can go to the Social Engagement Analytics area to get insights from a data set that contains all posts that all search topics gathered in the specified time frame.

All pages in the Social Engagement Analytics area share the following structure:

• Analysis focus: Define’s the data that your currently focuses on analysis, and select a search topic, a category of search topics, or all search topics.
• Filter section: Edit or add filters to slice and dice your data set according to your needs.
• More options: Use the available filters to work with the same data set in another area of Social Engagement.
• Time frame: Select the dates so that you want to analyze your data. You can also select a custom date or predefined values.
• Data summary: Look into the number of posts and the trend of your current data set.
• Page navigation: Move the different pages in between Social Engagement Analytics area. Each page provides a more detailed view of important aspects of your data : Overview, Conversations, Sentiment, Location, Sources.
• Dynamic widgets: This area mainly contains widgets that display when certain criteria are present.
• Static widgets: The widgets in this area are always visible.
• Post list: Enlarge this area to see the most recent posts that match your current data set.

Get Around in the Settings Area

Administer your Microsoft Social Engagement, and set-up the options for your solution and its users.

• Page navigation: Move the different pages in between settings area. Every page lets you set options that apply system-wide or to individual users only. Depending on your user role, you may not see all pages in the area : Personal Settings, Global Settings, Social Profiles, User Management, Connections, Automation Rules
• Settings options: Set-up the values on the settings pages based to your needs.

Privacy notices

Microsoft Social Engagement gives a hosted online services accessible to a wide variety of customers and comprises the following social capability components within the software application:

Social Media Monitoring – It is an ability to listen to and monitor publicly available social communications across public and managed networks administered by third parties.

Social Engagement Analytics – It is an ability to identify, compute, and project queries related to publicly available documents and posts.

Please make a note that Microsoft Social Engagement may enable access to third-party services, such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, and blogs whose privacy practices may differ from the MS Social Engagement. The use of such services, and any information that you provide, is governed by their service-specific privacy statements.

When you establishing these connections, certain information, such as the search query used to retrieve Social Content and the IP address, may be shared with those services. Microsoft Social Engagement stores the customer search configurations and data curations in tenant separated databases.

The customer data is then cached on the server side in an internal Social Engagement Application, to allow common the retrieval indexing for the sole purpose of maximizing solution performance.

Access to the index cached data (customer data) is handled exclusively by the internal Social Engagement Application, and does not allow users to access or modify index cached data interactively in the internal Social Engagement Application.

Locus IT provides Social Engagement services like Social Engagement training, Social Engagement implementation and support. For more information please contact us.