Introduction to Channels, Users, and Teams

In this article, we'll go over the core Social Media Management building blocks you'll encounter in your organization: channels, users, and teams.

When you joined Social Media Management, we created an organization for you in the platform that acts as your company's unique environment to manage and analyze your social content. However, a bit of preliminary setup will go a long way in setting your organization up to collaborate successfully. After you connect your channels to the platform, invite users to your organization, and set up your teams, your organization will be prepared to start using the tools in our platform.


Introduction to channels

Before you can begin using the tools in Social Media Management, connecting your channels is an essential first step. We refer to any network account you will connect to our platform as a "channel." Connecting your channels to the platform will bring data and content from your social accounts into Social Media Management's tools and enable our software to help you manage areas of your social media presence, such as publishing social posts to your account when you use Publish, responding to your customer direct messages using Engage, analyzing your social account metrics using Measure, etc. 

Social Media Management currently supports the connection of specific account types for Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, WhatsApp, TikTok, YouTube, and Google Business Profiles.

Note:

For each social network, we only support the connection of specific account types based on the partnership we have with each network. For example, we only support the connection of Facebook Pages rather than Facebook personal profiles for Facebook. Visit our network-specific channel connection guides for in-depth information on what types of accounts we support for each network.

Ready to connect your channels? Follow the instructions in our Connecting Channels article for a quick tutorial. We also recommend visiting our network-specific channel connection guides to get detailed information on the connection requirements for each network.


Introduction to users

As an Admin for your organization, you'll have full rights to invite additional users to join Social Media Management and assign them a specific user role in the platform. Social Media Management's user roles aid in establishing a governance hierarchy for your organization and help your team streamline collaborative processes in our tools.

You'll create and invite new users for your organization using your users' email addresses. Once you have creates your users' profiles, they will receive an invitation to Social Media Management via email to complete their account setup.

Note:

The number of users that you can invite to your organization may depend on your Social Media Management Package. Please check with your Customer Success Manager (CSM) to confirm your user allotment.

Tip:

We recommend that you create user profiles using the user's professional email address and adding their first and last name so you can easily identify your users within the platform. User roles can also be assigned per channel that a user has access to offer a user different roles for different channels. For example, a user can be an Editor in one channel and a Moderator in another. Users can also be granted the Team Leader add-on to gain select Admin permissions to assist in managing a team.

Ready to set up your users? Visit our Managing Users article for detailed instructions on inviting new users and how you can manage your users in future.


Introduction to teams

After creating your users, you can group them together in teams based on your organizational hierarchies. While it may suffice a smaller organization to work in a single team, larger organizations may wish to create multiple teams for easier designation of oversight areas or tasks. For example, you could choose to create teams of users based on the channels they manage or based on your organization's specific markets or brands. In short, teams allow for full control over who can post to, engage with, and report on the specific channels connected to your Social Media Management organization.

Since Admin users can manage all teams by default, they cannot be assigned to particular teams but can switch freely between teams using the Team View feature. All other user roles are bound to the teams they are assigned to, though a user can be on multiple teams and have access to multiple channels. For full flexibility, the Team Leader role can again be utilized to grant select users team-based Admin privileges.

Ready to set up your teams? Visit our article on Managing Teams for detailed instructions on creating and managing teams for your organization.


Once you've set up your organization with your channels, users, and teams, check out our module introduction articles to get familiar with each of the tools you will be using in Social Media Management.

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