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 and strategies. However, a bit of preliminary setup will go a long way in setting your organization up for success. Once you connect your channels to the platform, invite users to your organization, and set up your teams, your organization will be ready to efficiently start collaborating and managing your social media presence.
In this article:
Understanding Channels
Before you can begin using the tools you have available in Social Media Management, you will connect your social network accounts to bring your data into the platform and grant our software access to manage aspects of your social account using Social Media Management's tools (e.g. publishing social posts to your account when you use Publish, etc.) We refer to any network account you will connect to our platform as a "channel."
Social Media Management currently supports the connection of specific account types for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, TikTok, YouTube, and Google Business Profiles.
Note:
For each network, we support the connection of specific account types only. For example, for Facebook, we only support the connection of Facebook Pages rather than Facebook personal profiles. For Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, you will connect your user account. For WhatsApp, we support connection to the WhatsApp Business account that your WhatsApp phone number is connected to. Visit our network-specific channel connection guides for in-depth information on what types of accounts you can connect to Social Media Management for each network.
By connecting your channels, you provide Social Media Management with a token to access those channels. You can think of a token as a key that allows us to send and receive information from the native networks via their application programming interfaces (APIs). Connecting your channels and granting Social Media Management permission to your accounts enables you to manage your complete social media presence from inside Social Media Management.
Once you're ready to connect your channels, you can follow the instructions in our Connecting Channels article for a quick tutorial. We also offer network-specific channel connection guides that offer detailed information on all of the considerations for connecting to each network we support.
Understanding Users
You and your colleagues will each have a user profile and role in Social Media Management to streamline collaboration and governance in your organization.
You'll set up the user profiles for your organization using your users' email addresses, which they will use to sign into Social Media Management. We recommend that you create user profiles using the user's work email address and adding their first and last name so you can easily identify your users within the platform.
Each user can be assigned a user role. Admin users will have full rights to manage all users and channels in the organization. The Editor, Content Creator, and Moderator roles have varying access rights, allowing you to allocate the appropriate permissions for each user. Users can also be granted the Team Leader add-on to gain select Admin permissions when managing their teams. Visit our User Roles article to get a detailed look at the permissions for each role in Social Media Management.
Tip:
Roles can be assigned per channel that a user has access to. For example, a user can be an Editor in one channel and a Moderator in another.
All Admin users can create, edit, and delete other users by following the instructions. When you're ready to begin setting up your users, visit our Managing Users article for detailed instructions.
Note:
Depending on your company's Social Media Management package, the number of users available for your organization may be limited.
Understanding Teams
Teams group users together with the channels they manage, as well as with other stakeholders.
Whereas smaller organizations can work in a single team, larger organizations may want to create multiple teams for each of their markets or brands. This segmentation allows for full control over who can post to, engage with, and report on the specific channels connected to your Social Media Management organization.
Admin users are not assigned to particular teams but can switch freely between them using the Team View feature. (Please note that since Admin users can manage all teams by default, only Admins can see and use Team View). 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.
Visit our article on Managing Teams for detailed instructions on setting up a team 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.