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Conversations: Best Practices

Best practices for utilizing the Conversations tab in Meltwater Engage for Community Management.

Cheyenne V. avatar
Written by Cheyenne V.
Updated in the last hour

Conversations is the main source to see engagements with your social media channels. Here, you will find the content streams from each of your connected channels. You can read and respond to your inbound messages, share messages with team members, and tag messages for trend reporting and filtering.

This article will cover:


Best Practices in Conversations

Below are the best practices that you should be utilizing for all Conversations use cases.

Saved Responses

Using Saved Responses allows you to create a shared repository of frequently used messages to respond to fan messages. This standardizes your responses and increases your efficiency in responding. Saved responses are channel and message-type agnostic, can be accessed by all Engage users, and can be edited when applied to allow for personalization.

It is a best practice to use a naming convention when saving your responses, to allow you to search for, and find them quickly.

Example Saved Responses:

  • Switch to DMs

    • Thanks for getting in touch! Please DM us and we can follow up with more personal advice.

  • Find more info on our website

  • Positive Feedback

    • Thanks for sharing your feedback! We’re happy you enjoyed it!

  • Negative Feedback

    • Thank you for sharing your feedback. We’re sorry your experience was less than perfect. Please let us know how we can correct this for you.

Learn more about Saved Responses.

Assignments

By assigning posts you've received to your social media profiles, you can ensure the right teammate is notified of and responds to incoming Conversations. This is one of the best ways to work through your queue efficiently and offer excellent customer service.

Assigning a message to another teammate will notify them of a message that requires their attention, even if they are not logged in to Meltwater. You can include notes with your assignment to provide further context on the message and reason for the assignment.

Assignments can be used for collaboration or escalation of any inbound fan message. Assignments can be changed to move through a dedicated escalation path or sent back to the original escalator with notes on how to handle them.

Members who are often escalated to can use the Content filter to display only messages Assigned to themselves.

Find

Click the magnifying glass at the top of the content stream to open the Find Bar. You can search for @mentions, hashtags, and keywords within your fan messages. Inserting more than one search term treats the search as an AND statement.

For example, if you search "tracking" and "delay", results will only return messages that contain both of these words.

You can use this to quickly find messages that require your attention first, assign them to another team member, or clear them out of your queue.

Find is also a great way to search for older messages after they have already been completed and are no longer in the queue.

Tags

Tagging fan messages is a great way to track your inbound message trends using the Cross Channel Tags report in Analyze. This allows you to see if your volume is going up or down per tag.

You can also use tags to segment and filter inbound messages. This allows you to easily filter down tagged messages to create additional queues.

Tagging can be done individually per message or in bulk.

Example tag types

  • Customer service tags - create tags to segment the types of messages you regularly receive from customers on social. Ex. complaint, shipping, inquiry, etc.

  • Campaign tags - use the same tags for your outbound campaigns in Publish to track inbound interest in each.

  • Team tags - if your customer service group is divided between teams with different responsibilities, you can segment inbound messages to each with individual team tags.

Learn more about Tagging Social Posts.

User Profile Information

Each fan interaction is recorded and kept as a history for that particular fan and channel. To access a fan's profile, click their profile picture in the viewing pane.

There are two tabs available: Notes and History.

Notes are internal only and can be left so other team members have more insight into who you are interacting with. For example, you can leave notes on how to interact with the fan or what follow-up items are requested.

History displays all inbound messages from that fan to the specific social account. You will see each interaction in descending order by date.

Bulk Actions

Save time by bulk marking messages Complete, as well as bulk tagging.

Learn more about User Profile Information.


Customer Care

Most organizations measure customer care success by resolution time. Using the below settings, you can optimize Conversations to help achieve higher resolution times.

Sorting

Sort your content stream by date, with the oldest messages first. Doing so allows any new messages that you receive while working to enter the bottom of your content stream instead of the top. This prevents new messages from pushing older messages down in your queue, which would extend the time it takes to get to them, resulting in longer response times.

Filters

Status

  • Set your status to New messages only. After you reply or mark a message as complete, it will leave your queue. This allows you to focus only on messages that require action.

Date Range

  • Set your date range to the Last 7 days. If you have not responded to a fan message on social media within the past seven days, you have missed your window.

Protip: For mature customer care teams, set your date range to all times to ensure that every message in the queue is handled.

  • You can also select the Custom date range, which allows you to filter down to the minute. This is recommended for teams that work on shifts to make sure each team member clears their queue before leaving or starts in the queue during their shift time. This can also be used during a crisis, new product launch, etc., to make sure you are only focusing on the most relevant messages at that time.

Sentiment

  • Using the Negative sentiment filter allows you to focus on the most important messages requiring a response first.

Content

  • Set your Content filter to Unassigned. This will clear the queue of any message that is currently assigned to another user, allowing you to only work on the messages no one else is currently responsible for. Learn more about Assigning Incoming Social Posts.

Custom Filter Sets

  • When selecting multiple filters at once, it is best practice to save the filter sets for easy access later. You can also set a specific filter set as your default each time you log in to Conversations.

  • It is recommended that you use a naming convention for your filters since they are shared between users.

Example Saved Filter Sets

  • Specific teams - Customer Care (Status: New, Date: All time, Content: Unassigned)

  • Specific team members - Robert's Filter

  • Specific social accounts - Facebook & Instagram Only

  • Message types - Only DMs

  • Subsets of connected accounts - Only Acme accounts (FB, TW, IG & LI)


Earned Community Engagement

Conversations about your brand don't happen only on your pages, handles, and content. It can be important to see and join these conversations. That is where Meltwater Explore comes into play.

Meltwater Explore Integration

Meltwater's Social Listening tool, Explore, can integrate X (formerly Twitter) listening data directly into Engage. This allows you to join conversations that you would not normally be able to within Conversations.

Explore Saved Searches

  • Using the Explore Saved Searches filter, you can surface conversations that may not necessarily mention you but are relevant to your brand or industry. Any saved X search in Explore is available to filter into your content stream alongside your other fan messages. This allows you to proactively provide customer service outside of just those messages that are sent directly to you.

  • In the example above, the user has used terms that I am listening for on social but did not @mention any handles. With traditional customer care or even native X, I would have missed this message.


Influencer Engagement

If you have influencers/ambassadors/advocates that represent your brand online, you can also view and interact with their social messages via Conversations. Once again, Meltwater Explore helps accomplish this.

Meltwater Explore Integration

Meltwater's Social Listening tool, Explore, can integrate X listening data directly into Engage. This allows you to join conversations that you would not normally be able to within Conversations.

Author Lists

  • Just like Explore Saved Searches, Author Lists can also be applied to messages within conversations. Use your saved X Author Lists to only focus on messages from the specific authors you choose, such as influencers or industry experts.


Outbound Messages

Conversations allows you to view the posts you've posted to your social pages and handles with the Brand Posts message Type filter.

Filtering by Brand Posts (Brand Posts for X) allows you to filter only for your page posts and X posts. This allows you to easily moderate messages by post rather than by when they were received.

You can also tag outbound posts via this view as well.


Mobile App

The Meltwater Engage Mobile app allows you to quickly work through your content stream when not at a computer. You can easily respond to fan messages via your phone. Great for during an event, while in a meeting, or just away from your desk.


💡 Tip

Need more help? Feel free to reach out to us via Live Chat or check out our Customer Community.

Find answers and get help from Meltwater Support and Community Experts.


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