Marketing – Social Media Integration

In many ways, Social Media is a requirement in order to stay relevant in one’s industry, and the Mortgage industry is no exception. In BNTouch, you have the ability to integrate your Social Media accounts with your CRM, allowing you to manage your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter posts alongside your marketing.

The first step to handling your social media presence from within your BNTouch CRM is to connect your company’s social accounts to your CRM account. To do this, open your Marketing Tab and click the “Social Marketing” sub-tab. If you can’t see this option, click the “More” drop-down menu in the upper-right corner of the screen to display other sections.

Here, the options available for social media integration are separated into three categories: “Social Posts”, “Facebook Ads”, and “Admin Status”. The latter option will only display for administrative accounts. This video will focus on the first section: Social Posts.

The sub-tab that will display by default is “Social Posts”. Here, you can connect your social media accounts, find interesting news articles and images to share, post directly to your social feeds, and even schedule posts to be made later.

First, you will need to connect your accounts. At the top of the page, you will see options for logging into Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. When you click on any of these options, you will be taken to a page where you can log into the corresponding social media service, choose which permissions and what settings you would like to apply to your CRM, and connect your media account to your BNTouch account. If any of these services are already connected, you will see “Logged in” for that service and instead have a “Logout” link that can be used to disconnect your accounts.

Next, you will see a list of news stories and mortgage-related images. The articles below are pulled from various RSS feeds related to current news or the mortgage and financial industries. You can change feeds to choose from using the drop-down menus above the article lists.

You can check out any of the articles yourself by clicking the blue title link at the top of a story. Additionally, you can post any of these stories just by clicking the button to the right of the title. For images, you just have to click on them to post them. Any images you have already posted will display a message with the date you last used them.

When you post a story or image, a new page will open. Here you can choose which social media services you want to post it to. Next, you can set the title of your post and add any of your own text. To the right, you will see the article brief displayed in a small text box. You can copy and paste this into the “Post Text” box to include it with your social media posting.

For social media services that have a character limit, the “Characters Count” will show how many total characters have been added to your post. If you go over the total characters allowed by a social media site, a link will be included in the post to view the complete post.

To include an image with your post, just click the “Browse” button to select a file from your computer.

Lastly, you can choose to either “Post Now” or “Schedule for Later” using the “When” drop-down menu. If you opt to schedule a social media post for later, you can then set a date and time when it will be posted. Please note that the “Schedule for Later” feature is not available for accounts with “Safe Mode” enabled for their marketing.

Once your post is ready, click “Create Post” to either post it immediately or ready it for a scheduled posting.

Below the Content Discovery articles, you will see a list of all Scheduled Social Media posts for your account. Any posts you have created and scheduled for later posting will appear here, and the “Status” column to the right will show whether they are still pending or have been successfully completed.

From this list, you can jump to any of the actual posts on your social media networks by clicking the icons in the “Networks” column. The “Image” column allows you to view any pictures you have attached to your posts, and the blue “Subject” titles can be clicked to edit posts. Once the scheduled post time has passed, you will only be able to view posts this way, as they cannot be edited once posted.

You can add new posts from here using the “Create New” button. This uses the same process as scheduling a later post from the Content Discovery list above, but you will not have the ability to copy news feed material to your message.