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Now available: Improvements to Re-auth notifications of social accounts in Marketing

NeerajH's avatar
NeerajH
Khoros Alumni (Retired)
3 years ago

What is changing?

The ability to configure recipients for re-auth and de-auth email notifications and manage timely re-authentication of the social accounts.

Why is this change being implemented?

At present, when a social account is deauthenticated on Khoros, we send out an email notification to all users who had authenticated that social account on Khoros in the last 180 days.

When an active social account is near to the period when its token is due to expire, we send out a series of emails 30 days, 7 days and 1 day prior to deauthentication to all users who had authenticated that social account on Khoros in the last 180 days.

 

This solution only partially addresses the pain points experienced by our end users.

Often, the users who authenticated the social account from our customer’s side are an individual. They get plenty of email notifications. Our warning emails may get missed, or buried under a clutter of other emails or not get acted on immediately. 

This creates an undesirable situation where we have a single point of contact responsible for keeping the social account within Khoros active. It can also lead to situations where active campaigns are stopped mid-flight because of the unexpected deauthentication of social accounts within Khoros. The user/customer would like to re-authenticate their social account as soon as possible to minimize the loss of data.

Social accounts that are connected to Khoros Marketing lose their connection because of multiple external factors. We list the main reasons below:

  1. Manual updates to your social network’s account settings, like changing a password. 
  2. ‌At times, the social networks force tokens to expire as a security measure. 
    1. The networks may detect what they think is a suspicious login attempt to your account from a suspicious browser, location, or device.
  3. Tokens reaching the end of their built-in lifespans. 
    1. Instagram tokens expire every 90 days as a policy from Meta.
    2. The user who connected the account to Khoros may no longer be an Admin of the Facebook Page or group.

What is changing?

Through this fresh change, we will enable users to configure recipients for de-auth and re-auth email notifications from Khoros to efficiently manage the authentication of social accounts. We will also display the number of days left for an account to expire (for networks like Instagram with a known lifespan of token expiry).

How can users configure these settings?

If a user has access or permission to add social accounts on Khoros, they will be able to configure recipients for that account. 

They would have to visit Khoros Settings > Social Accounts page, and will see a new Settings icon (a gear cog - see image below) next to the Re-authenticate button. 

Clicking on that will display a new pop-up which will seek inputs on:

Roles to notify: 

  • A list which has all default and custom roles will be available.
  • Users can select multiple roles.
  • Each selection appears as a blue tile chip that can be removed by clicking on the ‘x’ button.
  • The email notification will go out to only users with the selected Roles who belong to the specified Initiative to which that particular social account is linked. 
    • The email notification WILL NOT go out to all users with that Role in the Khoros product. 
    • We deliberately chose to have this condition only for those Users who fit that role AND have access to that social account as we did not want to overburden the inboxes of all users belonging to a specific role. 

Users to notify:

  • The User list available for selection will comprise the list of ALL users in the Khoros product from that company (whether or not they have access to the social account).
    • We deliberately chose to have this condition as we recognise that there will be a specific set of users who might need to be informed about the deauthentication of a social account. 
  • Each selection appears as a blue tile chip that can be removed by clicking on the ‘x’ button.
  • We do not have any cap on the number of users you want to notify – You can manually select as many users as you want.

After selecting the desired Roles and / or Users to be notified, if you hit “Save” you will see whether the changes were successful or not.

One can choose to select Roles only, Users only or a combination of Users and Roles. If a combination of Users and Roles is selected, then this condition is treated as a union of the two groups (with intersections across these two groups treated as unique).

After this, whenever an account has been deauthenticated, the selected users and roles (that belong to the initiative connected to the social account) will receive an email notification about initiating steps to re-authenticate the social account within Khoros.

  • It is assumed that the members who are notified will follow-up outside of the product and get the admin of the social account to re-authenticate. 

Number of days left before deauthentication: 

Once the settings are saved, as an additional measure, we show the number of days left before the social account gets deauthenticated (as shown in the screenshot above) on the Social Accounts screen. 

  • Accounts that are within 30 days to 6 days of getting deauthenticated have the number of days left before deauthentication shown in Black.
  • Accounts that are within 5 days of getting deauthenticated have the number of days left before deauthentication shown in Red.
  • Accounts that are within 1 day of getting deauthenticated have the number of hours left before deauthentication shown in Red.

What are the expected benefits this change will bring?

  • Better transparency and auditability by letting multiple people stay informed about an account getting deauthenticated.
  • Ability for timely actions. It will not lead to a single point of failure. As more people will get informed about a social account getting deauthenticated, it will spread the accountability to more people and lead to timely interventions and corrective actions. 

When will this change kick-in?

  • This feature will be available in GA by Sep 20, 2022

FAQs:

Q. What were the email notifications sent prior to this change? How are they changing?

A. The following emails were being sent prior to the current change:

    1. Before deauthentication has happened: Warning mails only sent for Instagram - 30d / 7d /1 day in advance to all the users who authenticated this account in the last 180 days. 
    2. After deauthentication has happened: 1 mail goes out to all the users who authenticated this account in the last 180 days (across all networks).
    3. Summary deauthentication emails: A summary email goes to the company owner every 7 days (on Mondays) - It has a list of all the deauthenticated social accounts in the last 180 days. 

The following emails will be sent after the new changes:

  1. If no specific set of users / roles are configured, the email notifications as per the default settings described above will hold.
  2. If a specific set of users / roles are configured:
    1. Before deauthentication has happened: Warning mails are only sent for IG - 30/7/1 day in advance to only the users who were specified.
    2. After deauthentication has happened: 1 mail goes out to to only the users who were specified (across all networks).
    3. Summary deauthentication emails: A summary email goes to the company owner every 7 days (on Mondays) - It has a list of all the deauthenticated social accounts in the last 180 days. 

 

 

Q. Will these changes be available to all customers? What will it cost?

A. These changes will be made available to all current and existing customers of Khoros at no additional cost.  

 

 

Q. When will these changes be rolled out?

A. These changes will be made generally available to all Khoros customers by Sep 20, 2022.

 

 

Q. Can we configure these settings for multiple accounts at the same time?

A. Yes. There is a new multi-select selection box in the social accounts page. Using that, one can select multiple social accounts and configure the set of users / roles to be notified at once. The user would select multiple accounts and then click on the “Bulk Add/Update Reauth Settings” button visible at the bottom of the screen (see screenshot below) to configure the specific users or roles that need to be notified.

The advantage with this feature is that the user can make changes to multiple accounts at once without having to click on the gear icon of each social account and make changes one account at a time.

 

Q. Are these settings available for existing social accounts only? Are they also available to new accounts? 

A. These settings are available to all social accounts – New and Existing. For newly added social accounts, during the account addition process, you will first authenticate the account and then you will see a new setting, which is a gear icon (next to the ‘x’ button) as shown in the screenshot below. Clicking on the gear icon will initiate the pop-up modal that lets you add Users / Roles to be notified when the account has deauthenticated or is near to getting deauthenticated.

 

 

Q. Are the warning emails for a social account that is about to expire sent for all networks?

A. The warning emails that a social account is about to expire are sent only for Instagram (30 days / 7 days / 1 day) prior to deauthentication. This is because Instagram is the only network that has a built-in lifespan for their tokens. Their tokens expire every 90 days. All other networks do not have this condition as their tokens do not expire.

 

Q. During configuration of these email notifications, would we need to specify both Users and Roles?

A. One can choose to select “Roles” only, “Users” only or a combination of “Users” and “Roles”. If a combination of “Users” and “Roles” is selected, then this condition is treated as a union of the two groups (with intersections across these two groups treated as unique).

 

 

More Resources:

 

 

Updated 5 months ago
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