What we can't capture in words, we can sometimes convey through imagery. Now, in Microsoft Social Engagement (MSE), we can do both! Along with a slew of other product enhancements that have been introduced to the platform, the ability to include media with published posts on Twitter and Facebook has made engagement with customers all the more streamlined and centralized. In today's blog, we'll take a look at these enhancements in more detail!

In the last few major updates for MSE, we were given the ability to publish social posts straight from the application. This lent to a much more efficient model of engaging a customer base, but in this, the age of the meme, we were left wanting a little more in terms of what were able to publish. Now, with the last update (1.2), we can add a little visual flair to our posts. So, you and your users might now go from this:

To this:

Microsoft Social Engagement will publish JPEG, PNG, and GIF files too, so you've got some options. All you need to do is navigate to a post somewhere in your instance (for this example, we'll use one in our Analytics area in the layout on the right). In the image below, we are doing the following:

1. Hitting Reply on the post to jump into a social post.

2. Adding in message content and any trends or hashtags.

3. Clicking on the new Add Media button to look for what we'd like to publish with our message.

From here, a file explorer will open and we can select our media (in this case, a PNG image), which will then be queued up to publish along with our post.

Outside of adding media to posts, users can also do the following with Microsoft Social Engagement:

• Get a more complete picture: view Twitter author details right from MSE, including profile information and recent posts.
  
• Make it your own: add custom sources using RSS and Atom feeds from the web.
  
• Link it up: find and share posts and links from a post found within the MSE Social Center or Analytics areas.
  

Put all this alongside some of the newly added functionalities like enhanced post filtering and routing, intention analysis (a step beyond the already-powerful sentiment values within MSE), and budding automation rules, and you've got a robust social platform that can help drive your channel marketing, customer service, and overall customer engagement strategies as well as provide top-notch social analytics and collaboration capabilities.

The best part about everything here is that with the newer linking ability to send information to Microsoft Dynamics CRM we get a vastly more integrated Social CRM system that's continually innovating and adding value to sales, marketing, and customer service teams of all flavors. Want to learn more about MSE? Check out this blog!

Happy CRM'ing!