Platform Updates – Lava Surf

LinkedIn Now Available!

Posted on August 22, 2018August 22, 2018 by Josh Landon

Since the beginning of the year, we’ve added Instagram and Google My Business to the Lava Surf platform. So, we’re more than excited to announce the addition of LinkedIn publishing to our platform!

With the addition of LinkedIn publishing, you will be able to connect up your LinkedIn company pages and publish image, link, and video posts. LinkedIn publishing will be especially useful in helping you share your own blog content which can drive traffic back to your website.

To connect your LinkedIn account, simply navigate to Social Accounts and click “Connect” under LinkedIn. You’ll then need to accept the permissions that we’ll require to connect up your LinkedIn pages as well as publish on your behalf.

Once your account is all connected up and you’ve imported your pages, you can start publishing posts. You can create and publish posts to LinkedIn all within Launcher just like you would for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

If you have an questions in regards to getting set up with LinkedIn, please contact your Lava Surf account manager or your admin.

Lava Surf Dashboard Update

Posted on June 27, 2018June 26, 2018 by Kate Smith

Lava Surf is unveiling several new features to make your experience with social media management more seamless! The newest updates on the Lava Surf Dashboard are Google My Business publishing and review response and Instagram comment moderation.

Google My Business Publishing and Review Response

We have further integrated Google My Business into the Lava Surf platform so you can now view and respond to reviews on your Google listings all with the Moderation dashboard. Why is this important? By not responding to your reviews you run the risk of increasing your customer churn by 15%.

In addition to being able to moderate from the dashboard, you can now publish “What’s New” photos and link posts to your Google My Business profiles. When creating a link post, you will also be able to select a call to action to go with your post.

To view and respond to Google reviews, visit the ‘Moderate’ page under Moderation after you’ve connected up Google My Business. If you don’t have a Google listing set up for one of your locations, you can learn how to set that up here.

You will, however, not be able to publish video posts to your Google My Business profiles since that has not been made available through Google yet.

Instagram Post Comment Moderation

With the number of users on Instagram increasing daily, moderation is becoming more important than ever. As a Lava Surf user, you can now view comments made on all your Instagram posts and respond to them through the dashboard!

All comments made on posts published to any of your connected Instagram profiles will be viewable in the Moderation dashboard. You will also be able to respond to comments, allowing you to easily engage with your followers.

Please contact your admin or Lava Surf account manager if you have questions on setting up your Google My Business account and profiles.

Facebook Data Update

Posted on April 5, 2018April 6, 2018 by Kate Smith

You’ve probably heard about the Cambridge Analytica fiasco at Facebook. Because of this, Facebook is taking a couple steps behind the scenes to prevent future problems from occurring.

So, how will this affect you?

For now, it won’t. We’ve taken steps to ensure your connection is not interrupted and everything will be business as usual. We do expect to see Facebook send more changes down the pipe, so we’ll keep you aware of relevant changes as they occur.

Please feel free to contact your Lava Surf Account Manager with any questions.

-The Lava Surf Team

New Feature: Calendar/Library Visibility & Permissions

Posted on March 9, 2018 by Kate Smith

In our quest to continually enhance your experience with Lava Surf, we’re announcing a new and exciting feature that will cut down on calendar clutter and allow for more collaboration between users.

What is changing?

This is an optional feature that can be turned on and off depending on your preferences. For all current users, nothing will change automatically. The calendar and library will function the same as it does now. For those who may be interested in utilizing this setting, this is what will change:

Voluntary post sharing between users will be enabled
“Make post visible to all users” option will be added to post creation
Admins will be able to see and edit all posts created by any user in the organization’s Calendar and Library
Non-Admins will see posts they have created & that have been made visible to all users
Non-Admins will only be able to edit posts they have created

What are the benefits?

The ability to share posts with peers without fear of alteration
The option to utilize peer content through cloning
A less cluttered calendar view that only shows what is actively shared

How do I activate this feature?

If you are interested in taking advantage of this new tool in your organization, please contact your Lava Surf account manager about activation.

-The Lava Surf Team

Facebook changes to custom link posts July 2017

Posted on July 10, 2017October 30, 2017 by Frank Baker

Facebook is making a change to its ability to customize links posts. As of July 18, Facebook will remove the ability to customize link previews for Facebook group and profile posts in an effort to reduce fake news and a misrepresenting of link content. This will effect all of Facebook’s API partners, including Lavasurf.

The ability to customize the image, title or description of a link preview in Facebook profile or group posts will no longer be available.

Facebook will now only pull the link previews from a websites metadata. If you share a link to a website that is not your own, be aware that it may not have this metadata available. So a complete link preview with an image may not be generated in some cases.

Note that posts scheduled to go out after July 17 will do so without any link customization. The links will instead display their default metadata, if available.

Facebook has documentation on sharing web-hosted content to ensure that links from your own sites are shared with optimal link preview data.

Category: Platform Updates