Toucan Documentation
How do I get it, and what do I do now?
Toucan provides the ability to fully integrate twitter with Salesforce CRM. This page summarizes the key features by role (Sales, Marketing, and Support) and more detailed how-to steps. For further questions not answered here, check out our Frequently Answered Questions.
How do I get it?
To install Toucan, see our installation steps. Be sure to complete the first post-installation configuration step and add twitter to your Remote Site Settings.
How do I use Toucan?
The main features of Toucan are organized below by user role, Sales, Marketing, or Support.
Everyone
- First Steps. Enter your twitter or Hootsuite ID.
- Use as a full twitter client. View your twitter home page, replies/mentions, post updates, send replies and direct messages, follow a user.
- Find other twitter users in your company and follow, send messages, and view their tweets.
Marketing
- Run a Tweet Campaign. Drive traffic to your web page and track the number of click-throughs.
- View detailed statistics on people that click-through from your twitter post including geographical location and time of day.
- Generate ROI for Social Networking through custom web-to-lead forms that link leads with one of your twitter post/update.
Sales
- Link twitter IDs with Contacts and Leads.
- View and respond to twitter posts directly from the Contact or Lead page in Salesforce CRM.
- Add twitter IDs to your Hot List, a list of up to 10 twitter IDs that you want to make sure to not miss.
- Save a twitter update as an activity on the Contact or Lead record.
- Search twitter for key words, names, products, or competitors.
- Automatically create a Lead, Contact, or Account from a tweet.
Customer Support
- Create a customer support case from a twitter posting, perhaps based on a comment from one of your contacts or from the results of your searching the twittersphere for problems with your products.
- Show the latest tweets from the case user directly on the Case page in Salesforce CRM.
- Respond to a support case via twitter.
First Steps
The first step is to click on the Settings tab and enter either one or more Twitter IDs or Hootsuite IDs. You must first configure the Remote Site Settings as described in the Installation Documentation for this to succeed.
Everyone
Authorize Twitter ID via Oauth
Twitter has migrating to using OAuth for 3rd party applications like Toucan, so you will never enter your twitter password into Toucan. Instead, click on the Settings tab and enter you twitter ID and click the Add Via OAuth button. Twitter will then prompt you to login if you are not already logged in, and then ask you if you want to allow Toucan to access your Twitter Account. Click Allow and you will be returned to Toucan.
| The main Toucan tab (Timeline) shows your twitter home page and your replies and mentions (@mytwitterid) |
| You can find other twitter users in your company. As more users begin using Toucan, Toucan will know which of your co-workers have twitter IDs. Click on the Users sub-tab within Toucan to search for other people in your company using twitter. |
Marketing
About Tweet Campaigns
Toucan provides you a way to link multiple tweet posts back to a single campaign. Because Campaigns are not available in Professional or Group editions, we created a custom Tweet Campaign object. For those that wish to use Salesforce's built-in Campaign record type, it is possible to create one or more triggers that will auto-create and auto-sync a Campaign with a Tweet Campaign.We can provide these consulting services for a one-time charge.
When running a Tweet Campaign, you typically want to drive users back to a promotional page on your own web site. Most twitter users are familiar with companies the provide free services to shorten long URLs and give you a short one to place inside a tweet. Three of the most common ones are http://ow.ly, http://bit.ly, and http://tinyurl.com. The people at ow.ly and bit.ly are kind enough to also provide statistics on how many people click your short links and get re-directed.
We recommend working with ow.ly for statistics on your Tweet Campaigns. If you are a hootsuite user (Free to Sign Up), you can view more detailed statistics from within your Hootsuite account. If you use the default ow.ly URL shortener, everything is ready to go and you do no need any additional configuration.
If you have a bit.ly API key, Toucan will make the integration and pull your click through statistics back into your Tweet Campaign. To perform this integration, register with bit.ly for an account. You will select an ID and will receive an API key. Enter both the ID and API key on the Toucan Settings page.
Running a Tweet Campaign
To run a Tweet Campaign, simply follow these steps:
- From within Toucan, click on the Tweet Campaign tab.
- If you have previous Tweet Campaigns, you will see them here if the status is still Active.To start a new campaign, click on the Launch New Campaign button. It will clear out any other entries you might have had, so it might not look like it did anything. If you want to add to an existing campaign, click the Tweet Again button next to the campaign.
- If you want to track metrics to your landing page, enter the full URL of the landing page and click the Generate Short URL button. This will only work if you use ow.ly or have registered with bit.ly and entered your name and API Key on the settings tab.
- Enter the name of the campaign. This is just for your internal use.
- Enter the 140 character tweet. Be sure to copy the newly-generated short URL in the appropriate place of your tweet. Toucan can't know where it should go in your message so will not put it in there automatically. You need to do a copy/paste.
- Select the twitter ID to be used for this message.
- Click Go to launch the campaign and post the tweet.
Other Tweet Campaign Thoughts
- At any time, you can re-tweet and link it to the same campaign by using the Tweet Again button.
- Because salesforce will not call to outbound services as a background job, you have to manually click the Refresh Status button to update stats for all tweets on each campaign.
- Click the Detailed Stats button to see the responses for each individual tweet.
- All of the usual Salesforce reporting can be run on the Tweet Campaign custom object to track which tweets had the highest response.
- When using the Tweet Campaign top-level Salesforce tab, you should have a custom button at the top that says Refresh Status. You can also manually re-configure the page layout to include more details in the list of Tweets. You should also override the New button on the Tweet object as described in the installation steps to be able to add a tweet to an existing campaign from here.
- When viewing the detailed stats, clicking on the tweet message itself will take you to bit.ly's web page where you can get more details on click-throughs like time of day and geolocation. Hootsuite users can see the ow.ly statistics from within Hootsuite.
Sales
Link Twitter IDs with Contact and Leads
| To link a twitter ID with a Contact or Lead you have two choices. First, simply add their twitter ID to the custom field on the Contact or Lead page. The other option is to select the Link User link on a twitter message within Toucan. |
View and Respond to Twitter Posts Directly Within the Contact or Lead Page in Salesforce
| If your administrator has added the Toucan module to the Contact and Lead page layouts, you'll see a new section on the page as shown in the figure to the right. If you have assigned a twitter ID to this contact or lead, you can click the Show Recent Twitter Tweets button. |
Add Twitter IDs to your Hot List
| Do you ever follow so many people that you miss important tweets from one or more people? With Toucan, you can add up to 10 important twitter IDs to the Toucan Hot List. Then click on the Hot List tab to see the most recent updates from all of your Hot List users in one place. |
Save a Twitter Update as an Activity on the Contact, Lead, or Account Record
| To save a copy of a twitter message, you must first have linked this twitter user with a Contact, Lead, or Account. Once you have done that, click the More... link and select Save as Activity. |
Search Twitter for Key Words, Names, Products, or Competitors
| Toucan provides a way to search all twitter posts for key words and phrases. Select the Search sub-tab and enter your query. Be sure to click the Search button and not just press Enter. |
Automatically Create a Contact or Lead From a Tweet
| If you see a twitter message for a person that is not yet a contact or lead, you can make them one with Toucan. Click on the More... link and select Create a Lead or Create a Contact. |
Customer Support
Create a Customer Support Case
You can create a customer support case from a twitter posting, perhaps based on a comment from one of your contacts or from the results of your searching the twittersphere for problems with your products. To create a case, select the More... link and choose Create a Case. When a case is created, Toucan will pre-populate several fields including:
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View and Respond to Twitter Posts Directly Within the Case Page in Salesforce
| If your administrator has added the Toucan module to the Contact and Lead page layouts, you'll see a new section on the page as shown in the figure to the right. If you have assigned a twitter ID to this contact or lead, you can click the Show Recent Twitter Tweets button. |