Community managers are often monitoring several social channels including community forums. This integration lets you create streams in Hootsuite that display posts from your Vanilla community.
This guide outlines how to setup the integration and how it works.
Setting Up the Integration
You must have a Vanilla cloud account and a Hootsuite account.
Enable the Hootsuite Add-on in your Vanilla account:
- You will need to be an Admin to enable add-ons
- Navigate to the Add-ons page in the Dashboard and toggle the on button
- If you do not see the add-on, please contact your customer success manager or customer support.
Install the Vanilla App in Hootsuite
From within your Hootsuite account
- Click the ‘+’ icon to add a stream
- Click on ‘Apps’ and then ‘Get More Apps’
- Search for Vanilla
- Click install
Alternately, you can navigate to the Hootsuite App Directory from the left hand menu and search for Vanilla and then click on install.
You will have to do this multiple times if you wish to have multiple streams on the go. You can monitor multiple instances of Vanilla or have streams that displays a search based on a category in your community or a keyword.
Connect your Vanilla community
- Make sure your community is open in another browser tab
- Make sure you are logged in with a user Role that has the ‘staff’ permission enabled.
- Enter the URL of you Vanilla community, for example: https://www.vanillademo.com
- Click ‘Connect’
- The stream should load a list of recent discussions from your community.
Your integration has now been configured.
Using the Integration
The integration lets you do the following:
- View discussions created in your community in a stream
- Expand the discussion to view discussion comments
- Reply to a discussion
- Assign a comment to another Hootsuite user
- Mark an assigned comment as resolved
- Search based on discussions or keywords
Viewing Discussions & Comments
Discussions are loaded in reverse chronological order based on the date and time of the most recent comment. This means that older discussions will move the top of the stream each time a new comment has been added.
In the steam you will see the discussion title and a discussion body. By clicking on the speech icon, you can expand the discussion to see all entered comments.
Clicking on the reload icon will refresh the stream.
Clicking on a discussion title will take you to the discussion in Vanilla in a new browser tab.
Replying to a Discussion
To reply to a discussion, expand the discussion to reveal the comments and scroll to the bottom of the stream where you will see a box where the reply can be entered. Your comment will display in the Vanilla forum under your username.
Assigning and Resolving
To assign a discussion click on the ‘Assign’ icon below the comment that you want to assign. This will open the standard assignment dialogue where you can select a team and team member to whom the comment should be assigned.
Once the comment is assigned, you will see a panel above the comment with assignment information.
To view assignments, navigate to the assignments page in the Hootsuite app.
** Please note, assigned items from 3rd party apps such as Vanilla may not display in the new assignments manager. You may need to switch to the old assignments manager to see items from Vanilla.**
To resolve mark an item as resolved, click on the resolve icon and click on the ‘Resolve’ button.
Search
To search the community forum, click on the search icon and enter keywords if desired enter a category. Your stream will display discussions that match the search criteria.
If you would like to permanently monitor your community based on the search criteria, you can create a new stream by repeating the installation steps in section 1 and filtering the stream using search.
Notes
Advanced actions such as editing a user comment, applying a warning, using Reactions cannot be done via Hootsuite. You must click through to the discussion in Vanilla and take the action in Vanilla.
Assigned items from 3rd party apps such as Vanilla may not display in the new assignments manager. You may need to switch to the old assignments manager to see items from Vanilla.
When marking an item as resolved, the resolve button might cycle and resolve dialogue might not close as expected. The item status will change to resolve but the page might need to be refreshed in order for the dialogue to clear. Hootsuite R&D is tracking this issue.
