The next step once you've created your account will be to connect the social accounts you wish to use inside the Gator platform. You may already have connected a Twitter account for tweeting out the contents of your email campaigns but the Social Dashboard is a slightly different animal and therefore requires a separate connection / authentication.

As you enter the dashboard you'll be presented with a screen shot (see picture above).

Clicking the button will open a pop-up window requesting the login credentials for the Twitter account you wish to connect. It uses the standard OAuth authentication method provided by Twitter.

After this you’ll have the option to connect a Facebook Page and LinkedIn account if you wish although both of these are optional and can be skipped. As a word of warning, if you choose to connect a LinkedIn account, anyone that accesses the CommuniGator platform using the same login credentials as you will be able to post to your LinkedIn account through the Social Dashboard. We therefore strongly advise against connecting a personal LinkedIn account and instead create a company “personal” account.

Once your accounts are connected you’ll be able to specify which competitor Twitter accounts and Facebook Pages you want to track and compare yourself against. Competitor accounts for Twitter are required while competitor Facebook Pages are optional. For the competitor accounts on Twitter enter the “handle” of the account without the “@” symbol.

The step after adding your competitors provides options to add blog RSS feeds if there are specific blogs you’d like to keep track of. You’ll need to enter the full URL of the RSS feeds for those blogs, if you don’t want to add any or are unsure how to find the RSS feed URL for a blog you can skip this section.

This is followed by a series of fields where you can enter the keywords you’d like to track. These keywords will be used to populate the “Topics” and “News” areas of the Social Dashboard enabling you to find fresh new content to use in your email campaigns or talk about through your Social accounts.

1) Under the topic area is an activity graph displaying the number of posts made by the account. The Blue line demonstrates Tweets and the purple line demonstrates retweets that have been received over the past few days.

2) The percentage areas at the bottom of the Competitor Tab relate to the percentage of followers that are Fake (bots or spam accounts), inactive accounts and “good accounts”.

This section will automatically update with the latest data from the related services each time you enter the Competitor Tab.

The posting messages option is the functionality enabling you to post messages to your connected Social profiles. If you’ve only connected your Twitter account this will default to messages posted to your Twitter account. If you’ve connected a Facebook Page or LinkedIn profile you’ll be able to select which networks to post to.

You can also schedule posts from this window by click the little click icon at the bottom. This will then present a new window where you can set the scheduled campaign, date and time. A scheduled post needs to be associated with a scheduled campaign so the system knows that you’ve “booked” it in for posting at a time in the future. You can however assign multiple posts to a schedule campaign i.e. If you want to promote an event over a period of time you can assign all the scheduled posts to the same scheduled campaign.

If you schedule a post to be part of an existing scheduled campaign the top right corner of the screen will update to display existing posts in that scheduled campaign.

When scheduling you need to select a date and time and then click the “Add Date” button before you can click the “Schedule” button. The social network icon on the right of the schedule pop-up window denotes which network the scheduled post will be sent to.

The 5th icon in the list that appear when in the Social Dashboard tab enables you to see the despatched and queued posts that have been created through the scheduling functionality. Here you can delete scheduled posts from the queue if you change your mind and no longer wish to post them.