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- BLOX Total CMS
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Ideas
Set Broadcast time separate from Start Date/Time
First, thanks so much for adding the Broadcast feature to the TCMS. It's a very useful feature that will certainly get a lot of use.
It would be awesome if we could set a custom time to Broadcast assets separate from the asset's start time. This would enable us to send content to our social media channels for optimum visibility. For example, much of our content goes live on our website at 4:30 a.m. but it would be better to delay the Broadcast to Facebook until about 7:30 or 8 a.m. when there are more people on Facebook.
It would also be nice to have the ability to schedule multiple Broadcast times for different channels inside a single asset. For example, we would like to broadcast to Facebook once but may like to broadcast to Twitter three separate times, so it would be cool to have the ability to schedule a single FB broadcast and three Twitter broadcasts.
Finally — and I don't know if it's possible — but it would also be nice if media such as photos that are attached to assets could be broadcast to Twitter along with the asset's link.
Thanks,
Brad
Customer support service by UserEcho
Good ideas.
Bumping this because it is still a great idea.
Just about all of this will be in an upcoming version of BLOX. We will be formally announcing this soon, but I will give the loyal community site users a preview!
The Broadcast feature will become a new application called BLOX Notifier.
BLOX Notifier will enable messages to be sent to multiple targets:
It will allow you to set up automatic triggers, so you can say things like, "All article assets in the news section which have a flag of 'breaking' should go to the Breaking News channel."
Notifier will support multiple channels, and each channel will support multiple targets (such as multiple Twitter accounts, Email newsletters, etc.)
Inside the Editorial application, you can create multiple new messages for a single asset. So you can create one message with custom messaging & headlines for Facebook, and another message with a different headline for Twitter.
These messages can also be targeted to be pushed at a different time other than the start date/time of the asset. Each message tied to an asset can have a different time (i.e. the asset goes online at 7:30 am (start time), post to Twitter at 8 am, post to Facebook at 9 am, send an email newsletter at 12 pm)
What do you think? Any questions or thoughts so far?
Changing photos is not supported yet.
Thanks!
That looks very promising, thanks for the update Christine.
Will one of the scheduling options be "at the asset Start Date/Time" for when the person creating the notification doesn't know if an editor will move it later? If so it sounds like that will mitigate the problem from my other post today (Ticket 644051).
Also I assume that if someone schedules a notification for prior to the Start Date/Time the system will be smart enough to hold it until then and not broadcast something that results in a 404 page?
Yes, it defaults to the start date/time as the asset, and since it won't send out something that isn't live yet (to answer your second question), it just goes out as soon as it hits the start date/time (within a few minutes).
We also have a protection timeframe on items as well... if the start date/time is more than X minutes/hours ago (you can define this) then we won't send it. That way, we don't send out old stuff on accident.
Thanks Christine, can you confirm if it will fix this issue specifically: https://community.townnews.com/communities/1/topics/1095-totalcms-social-broadcast-limitations
Hi, Christine. All of this certainly looks interesting... thanks for the update! Might the Broadcast "glitch" in TCMS be fixed as well (see Support Ticket #625665)? In a nutshell, that glitch occurs when you set Broadcast attributes for an asset in TCMS, Save & Close the asset, and if the asset is re-opened again before the scheduled Start Time the Broadcast attributes disappear. I first opened that Support Ticket in August of 2017 and it's still an issue, so hopefully this will be fixed in the new version of BLOX.