Batchbook Adds Facebook, Enhanced Twitter & LinkedIn Integration

• Posted February 24th, 2011
• By sransom
• Filed under: How We Do It, Product Updates, Social Media, Technology, Twitter

We’re on a bit of a roll with launching revamped versions of integrations in Batchbook. First it was MailChimp and now it’s on to something very near and dear to our hearts: social media.

This is a major revamp to how we integrate social media in Batchbook. We’ve both revamped Twitter and Linkedin and added full Facebook support. Let’s take a look at some screenshots of the new integrations. We also have a great screencast at the bottom so you can see it all in action.

First let’s take a look at Twitter:

Build social media activity into your workflow
For each service, we’ve added a more complete profile to your social media supertag. You’ll now see “cards” for each connected account. On Twitter you can now follow, retweet, favorite and/or reply right from Batchbook. You can also save the individual tweets as Communications or To-Dos. Turning Tweets into actionable items is a fantastically useful way to bring social into your everyday Batchbook workflow.

As you’ll see in the screencast, the Twitter search on the Dashboard also has some enhanced functionality. You will see the same actionable options with each tweet. There’s also a new Twitter import option to download your Twitter contacts (both people you follow and people who follow you) straight into Batchbook. You can find that in the import section on the contacts browse section:

And now…Facebook integration!

One of the top requested features of the past few months? Facebook integration! So here it is in all its glory.

There are a couple caveats with the Facebook integration. We take Facebook privacy very seriously, so you will only see profile information for users who have their info public or you are friends with. If you try to view a profile that you are not friends with, you will be prompted to initiate a Facebook Friend request. Each user in a Batchbook account will need to authenticate, and permissions are based on the logged-in user. We won’t show profile information unless you specifically have permission to view it.

That said, we think this addition pretty awesome and we’re happy to deliver something that our customers have been asking for. You can view the last five Facebook wall posts for the user and like and/or comment right from BatchBook. You can also view education history if available, as well as Likes. Note that currently, Facebook statuses are not actionable in Batchbook due to to the aforementioned privacy concerns.

Last but not least: LinkedIn

Some of the same rules apply here as with Facebook for the same reasons. You see publicly available information and if you are connected to someone, you will see their full profile. As with Facebook, you’ll be prompted to send a connection request to the contact in LinkedIn if you are not already connected.

We display the last status, work history, bio, specialties and Recommenders. This is much improved over the previous version of our LinkedIn integration.

How to activate your social media accounts
In order to bring this level of integration into Batchbook, all users are required to authenticate their accounts with Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. When first viewing a contact detail page you will be prompted to authenticate and you can also authenticate your accounts via the Your Account link on the top right on every page in Batchbook. The good news is that you just have to do this once and you’re set.

Note: If you have an existing Batchbook account, you may need to edit your existing social media tag to add the new Facebook feed reader field. We tried our best to retrofit existing accounts but if you are not seeing it you can easily add it yourself by editing your social media supertag. All new accounts will have this automatically.

So that’s a quick look at a major update to our make our CRM even more social. We hope you enjoy using it as much as we did building it (but maybe with a little less Red Bull).

Here we go…