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Automated campaigns

Automated campaigns based on the connected import sources in your account

Jorgen Evens avatar
Written by Jorgen Evens
Updated over a week ago

Ambassify can be used to automate the delivery of content distributed through one of the supported import sources to community and non-community members in the form of both posts in an Ambassify community or as landing pages.
​
Given the complex nature of this type of integration, this is a managed feature for the time
being, which means that configuration and management of the automation is done by
Ambassify.

Supported import sources

Import sources that support automation are:

  • RSS feeds, e.g., from your blog

  • Facebook pages

  • LinkedIn company pages

  • Twitter profiles

  • Instagram profiles

Automation Flow

New posts (Facebook post, RSS feed item, LinkedIn Post, ...) are detected from an import source provided by the customer. These posts will contain a title, image, link, description and content.


Posts will be converted into Ambassify campaigns and optionally an Ambassify message with their target audience set as requested. Example: show this campaign to every member that is resident within the city with a provided postal code.


The campaign and/or message can be scheduled immediately or after a fixed amount of time. During this time a campaign can be modified, deleted, or manually published using the Ambassify platform. Updates to the imported post will not be propagated into previously created campaigns and/or messages, nor will they generate new Ambassify campaigns.


The campaign will automatically become available when the publish date and time is reached. Similarly, the message optionally associated with this campaign will automatically be sent to the specified target audience when the publish date and time are reached.


The target audience of a message is evaluated when the message is sent, meaning that target audiences are automatically updated with new members as they are added over time.

Automation constraints

Every post is received in a single language. Only the content of a single language is received from import sources. If the social network has a post with content in multiple languages, we will only receive the content of a single language. Which language is dependent on the social network's API.

Automation Configuration

Automations can set the same campaign fields as if you would just create the campaign yourself using the Ambassify interface. It is advised to walk through the configuration available in the UI to understand what settings you would like to set for your automated campaigns.

Dynamic data

Keep in mind that the information received from the import sources is limited to a specific set of data, and a single language dependent on the API of the import source.

Each post imported from an import source contains these fields. That means that you may choose to use these and only these as variable input to campaigns created using automation.

  • Post ID
    ​A unique identifier provided by the social network or RSS feed. This field typically is of little actual value, but could be used to identify a specific post later on.

  • URL to the original post
    ​A link to either the social media post or to the page linked in the RSS feed. Example, https://www.facebook.com/ambassify/posts/2995356510677559

  • Image of the original post
    ​A link to the image that the social network attached to your post, or the image associated with the RSS feed item. This field may be empty for some posts.

  • Date of the post in numeric form
    ​The number of milliseconds since 01/01/1970, also known as UNIX Epoch timestamp. Ambassify date fields, ex. publish time, support this format.

  • Post content
    ​Textual content in your post, is usually the text of your social media post or the summary in your RSS feed item.

  • External link in post
    ​The first link that may appear in the post content, is any link inserted by the author of the post. This field may be empty when no link was added by the author.

  • Post title
    ​The title of an RSS feed item. This field only has a value for RSS feed import sources.

Campaign configuration

For the Ambassify development team to enable automation on an import source we need you to specify how you would like the created campaigns to be configured.

We allow you to provide the desired values for each setting in one of two forms, dynamic or fixed.

  • Dynamic
    A dynamic value may contain references to any of the fields defined under the Dynamic data section we discussed earlier in this article.

  • Fixed
    Every campaign created from the same import source within Ambassify will have the setting configured exactly as requested by you. This means that you have to provide the text, link or other value in advance and it will be hard coded into the automation.

Typical configurations

Most customers typically choose these fields to contain dynamic values.

  • Campaign name
    ​This is the name visible to your managers in the back-end of your community. We typically set the ID of the import source post as the name, e.g., Tweet ID

  • Campaign summary
    ​It is common to set the campaign summary to the post content.

  • Campaign content/description
    ​Most customers expect this field to contain the post content.

  • Campaign URL
    ​The link to your blog post, tweet, Facebook post

  • Campaign image
    ​If the image is available via the import source, this could be the blog post header image, social media visual, or shared link image

  • Sharing copy
    ​Promotion title, description, or image. These are typically configured to match up with Campaign title. summary and image respectively.

These campaign fields are typically fixed:

  • Campaign title

  • Campaign author
    ​Must be one of the authors available from the author dropdown in a regular campaign

  • View article button text

  • Confirm button text

  • Thank you message

Mandatory fixed values

Due to the complexity associated with some settings, it may not be possible to use dynamic fields. The following fields are mandatory to be fixed and provided in advance.

  • Campaign tags

  • Campaign language
    ​Only applies if your account uses multiple languages.

  • Target audience
    ​Any audience you are able to build using the member search filters (email, name, groups, custom properties, interactions, ...) may be provided.

Approval flow

We offer the option to publish any campaign created using the automation immediately.

If you would rather have more control and only publish specific campaigns that you have curated we can configure your automation to create all campaigns in the Draft state.

Finally, we can schedule automated campaigns to be published at a later time. Giving a manager the option to review the campaign first.

Configuration, fine-tuning, and service credits

The process of setting up an automation is non-trivial and may take some time, that is why each and every automation has to be set up by one of the members of our development team.

Please read this document thoroughly to ensure a smooth configuration and start of your automated campaigns.

Once we set up these campaign automations you'll be able to see them at work in you account and if needed fine-tune the configuration. You are allowed to request a single free of charge as part of the setup, after that we will charge (a) service credit (s) for any further modifications.

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