With Lithium SMM, we want you to be able to recognize your customer and provide a seamless experience - every time, everywhere they reach out. To this end, our upcoming SMM release will include an update required by Facebook to ensure that you can identify the same customer interacting across more than one of your Facebook pages. You need to set up Facebook Business Manager and add all of your SMM-integrated pages by January 11th. Contact your Customer Success Manager if you have questions or require assistance. How do I set up Business Manager? You can read more about creating an account here Learn more about managing people, settings, and assets here And you can read about managing pages here How does customer identification work? Facebook will start using page-scoped id values, and the only way to identify a specific Facebook user across multiple brand pages is via a business-scoped identifier that is available only if pages are in a Business Manager account. This method provides key advantages to your teams: Gives an aggregated view of the customer’s information and interactions Enables you to retrieve customer account details from your CRM Allows you to continue a customer interaction across multiple pages Enables a bot to engage a customer across multiple pages If you have not added all of your pages to your Business Manager account by the January 11th deadline, you could cause duplicates for authors who had previously interacted with multiple pages. These authors will only be de-duplicated once they interact with each of your pages again. What are the benefits of using Business Manager? Business Manager is useful for both large and small teams working across one or many pages. It helps coordinate essential page activities, including: Understanding which activities improve your business’s performance and influence with key page and audience insights Keeping work out of your personal life with improved security and separate business and personal Facebook profiles for you and your team members Making it easier to see who’s working on what by centralizing  your business' Ad accounts, Pages, and the people who work on them ... View more

  Brands must be equipped to deliver amazing service across channels. Today’s consumers expect frictionless digital experiences across every digital screen, channel, and step in their journey. They don’t want to provide details you should already know, or answer the same question twice. The right solution will integrate consumers’ conversations and experiences, maintaining context along every step of their journey. And in order to provide a truly unified customer experience, both service agents and marketers need a holistic view of the customer they are interacting with. To meet this challenge, we are excited to announce three new features: the Lithium CRM Connector, Manage View, and Common Analytics. Now you can deliver a more seamless and personalized customer experience, keep a better pulse on social conversations, and consolidate analytics by: 1. Integrating Lithium SMM with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, or ZenDesk to create a unified view of the customer with the bi-directional CRM Connector. By connecting data (like contact information or loyalty status) from Lithium SMM to core CRM systems, brands can provide more context to agents so they can address and serve customers more effectively.     2. Creating custom views to better monitor, filter, organize, and respond to conversations happening across social channels with Manage View. This feature helps you track trends, identify emerging crises, and monitor specific conversations or audiences, while our existing Response functionality is designed for your agents engage at scale.       3. Accessing all Lithium analytics (including multiple communities) from a single space with Common Analytics. With this release, Lithium Social Intelligence (LSI) is now accessible from SMM Analytics. This makes it easy for you to manage, track, and measure social and community data together in one place.     USAA, a U.S.-based financial services company, has recently leveraged the CRM Connector to pull social data from Lithium SMM into their CRM for a unified view of contacts across channels. With this connection of data, USAA can execute a full cross-channel strategy and deliver a more personalized and seamless experience for their members. In fact, the Lithium CRM Connector has already empowered USAA to cut the time it takes for customer care documentation from 24 hours to 1 hour – a 95% time on task savings. Check out our case study to learn more. You can read more information about each of these features in our SMM release notes here. We’d love to hear your feedback on this release! Comment on this blog post below, and stay tuned for more feature announcements. ... View more

Facebook and Instagram are reevaluating the information they share with others and have begun making changes to help protect the privacy of their users. As part of this effort, they recently announced a switch to a new v2 API.  Lithium has been working diligently to update our integrations and completely switch to the new required Instagram API. To migrate, you must complete the steps below as soon as possible. By completing these steps promptly, you ensure that your information will continue to flow through Lithium seamlessly. Waiting to complete these steps may result in your integrations failing to work as expected. If you have already completed these steps (including emailing Lithium support as directed in Step 4), no further action is required on your part. 1. Convert your Instagram account to a Business Account and link to your Facebook pages Facebook and Instagram require you to have an Instagram Business Account that is connected to your Facebook page in order to have an Instagram integration in Lithium. Note that you can only connect one Instagram account to one Facebook page, and vice versa, so you must have as many Facebook pages as you have Instagram accounts. This is required for all Instagram accounts managed in Lithium. Note: If your Instagram account is already a Business Account, you must revert it to a Personal Account before proceeding.  Reverting to a Personal Account will remove Insight data. Facebook recommends saving your current insight data before performing this step. If you need assistance reverting an Instagram handle to a personal account, contact support so we can walk you through the process. More information about Facebook's current position on this can be found here. Learn how to connect your Instagram account to your Facebook page. During this process you will be prompted by Facebook to upgrade your Instagram account to a Business Account in order to properly link the two handles. 2. Add and verify all your Facebook and Instagram integrations to Lithium SMM Facebook now requires that brands link their Facebook pages to Instagram accounts. This means that, for every Instagram account that you want to add to Lithium SMM, you must link it to a Facebook page. To link your pages, you must add your integrations in Lithium. Learn how to add your Facebook account to Lithium. Learn how to add you Instagram account to Lithium. 3. Reconnect all your Facebook accounts  For Lithium to switch you to the new Instagram API, you must reconnect your Facebook account: Sign in to Lithium SMM. Go to Admin > Social Integrations. Click Edit next to the Facebook page you need to reconnect. Click Reconnect. Note: Make sure your pop-up blocker is OFF. If your pop-up blocker is on, the reconnect screen will keep spinning, and it will appear that nothing is happening. Add your Facebook credentials. 4. Toggle each Instagram integration off and then back on You must toggle each Instagram integration off and then back on under Admin > Social Integrations. Be sure to disable the integration for about 10 seconds before turning it back on. 5. Contact Lithium Support to associate your Instagram account with your Facebook page in Lithium Our Support Team will help you link your accounts. You can only map one Instagram account to one Facebook page. They cannot overlap. Fill out the following template and file a case through the portal after you have reconnected your Facebook account. -- Subject: Enable Instagram Publishing To: support@lithium.com Hello, Support Team! Will you please connect the following Facebook and Instagram accounts? Connection 1: Facebook: [ Facebook Page Name 1 as seen in Admin > Social Integrations ] Instagram: [ Instagram Account Name 1 as seen in Admin > Social Integrations ] Connection 2: Facebook: [ Facebook Page Name 2 as seen in Admin > Social Integrations ] Instagram: [ Instagram Account Name 2 as seen in Admin > Social Integrations ] -- Our Support Team will alert you when they’ve linked your accounts and migrated your integration to use the new Instagram v2 APIs. By completing these steps as soon as possible, you will ensure that your information will continue to flow through Lithium as expected.  ... View more