Expand your social media marketing horizons—Say hello to the new Zoho Social

As we celebrate 6 years of Zoho Social, we bring to you our biggest release yet! Introducing the new Zoho Social that spans a wide spectrum of functionalities—with a host of new features and integrations, set to elevate your social media marketing strategy. 

That's right—we're bringing out the big guns with this update! From brand-new channel integrations like YouTube, to highly-requested features like content approvals, and everything in between.

 So without further ado, first things first...

Video is the content of the now, and scaling up your video marketing efforts is a high priority in the marketing-verse. Meet our newest integration partner to help you in this pursuit - YouTube!

So many businesses today maintain a YouTube presence to help showcase their products, cross-post their content, feature their customer testimonials, and scale up their video marketing efforts.

Now with Zoho Social, you can publish and schedule video content to your YouTube channels directly, track performance for every video, and respond to engagements in real-time.

What's more, you can monitor your YouTube activity - all your Likes, Playlists, etc with dedicated Monitoring columns. You get to track your channel's performance with a robust set of YouTube reports & analytics. This covers everything from viewer stats, most watched content, and even granular information like the number of minutes spent watching your video content.

While you're at it, check stats ranging from follower growth, to engagement, and audience demographics. Don't forget‚ you can schedule your YouTube performance reports, export, or share them with your team and clients with ease!

Here's another small but necessary upgrade for your videos: Zoho Social now lets you set a custom video thumbnail for your content while publishing. The custom-thumbnail feature lets you pick a thumbnail from the video frames, or go with Zoho Social's thumbnail suggestions.

You can also upload an image or design of your choice to add as video thumbnails.

Streamlining your content workflow just got way easier. With the new Content Approvals and Workflow features, you can now work better with your team to move content around a structured pipeline. You can do this by setting up your own Approval system and optimizing your social media publishing routine.  

With the Approvals dashboard,you can assign specific team members as Approvers to moderate and publish drafts, and assign some team members as publishers or contributors who can create and send drafts for approval. This way teams can have greater editorial control over the content that goes out.

Publishing is central to any social media marketing strategy. With this update, we've added enough tools and micro-enhancements to turn our dashboard into a publishing swiss-army knife! These features are here to help you curate fresh content everyday, optimize your posts, and enhance their reach.

If you've wondered which channels fetch the most views for your URLs, this feature is here to help you answer that. By attaching UTM parameters to the links that you publish from Zoho Social, you can set trackers in place to monitor your social traffic. You can now define UTM parameters directly from Zoho Social, to get a a break down of engagement from each source. Afterwards, you can analyze these parameters with an analytics tool like Google Analytics.

Anyone who's social media marketing savvy knows the value of the Instagram first comment. It's where you drop all the details, the hashtags and the extra info that you can't crowd your caption with. On Zoho Social you can now pre-load a first comment to your Instagram Post and schedule it along with your post itself. You can do that right from the Publishing Window, where all the action happens.

By adding relevant keywords and hashtags in your Instagram first comment, you can optimize the reach of a post to get it across Instagram searches, and be discovered on the Explore page.

See something on the Monitor tab that you would want to Retweet? Now use the Retweet-Scheduling option, to schedule a Tweet for a later time. This lets you space out your posts, and not spam the feed. Bring attention to your Retweets by scheduling them for the best time of the day, to get more engagement.

We know how it's not always easy to manage content when you're a team handling social media. With this update, we seek to not only present features that scale up your content marketing, but also prove to be tools that can assist your entire team.

Get all your favorite website content delivered right to your RSS Feeds inbox on Zoho Social. Add your favorite websites as separate feeds and toggle between them to read article snippets. You can curate content from the RSS Feeds anytime. From this space, share articles with your social media audience by publishing or scheduling for later. This way you get to discover, read, and manage all subscribed content from one place and add to your buffer of content.

It doesn't matter where you're working from, or what device you're using—Zoho Social now packs a Media Library to serve as a content repository for you and your team. Store your brand assets and marketing content like videos, images, GIFs, etc to use anytime. You can add content to your Media library from your devices, or from our range of integrated cloud services.

Access any of your media from across a range cloud platforms such as Zoho WorkDrive, Google Drive, DropBox etc, right from Zoho Social's publisher. With our new Cloud Picker tool, now access your resources from within Zoho Social by simply connecting your Brand to your cloud services.

You can do so much more with LinkedIn now on Zoho Social, with the new LinkedIn Lead Ads integration. A useful addition to your dashboard that can help you manage all the leads captured from your LinkedIn Lead forms.

With LinkedIn Lead Ads you can promote targeted content to professionals and specific industry people, and gather more contact information via Lead Forms. With Zoho Social, this data can be seamlessly captured and analyzed. Lead details can also be synced back to your Zoho CRM sales dashboard via Zoho Social, by mapping form fields.

Previously, you could use our free browser extension zShare to share texts, links, and images from websites you visited. With a few useful tweaks, zShare is now positioned to make your content curation much faster and easier. Here's how:

zShare with Google

Get more out of your Google searches with your zShare browser extension. When you hit-up any search on Google, the zShare button will suggest related Keywords and User results pulled from Twitter for you to check out.

zShare with Twitter

If you're browsing the Twitter web app and find a Tweet you'd like to share, you can now directly share or schedule it as a retweet for later. You can do this by hitting the zShare button that pops up below the Tweet.

zShare with Facebook

See an interesting piece of content on Facebook that you'd like to share across your networks? Simply hit the zShare button below the post, to directly publish or schedule via Zoho Social.

If you're already using Zoho Social, the zShare extension can be downloaded from here.

We hope you like what you see here. Make sure to give the new dashboard a spin, and get a feel of it! You can of course, reach us anytime for feedback and queries at support@zohosocial.com or simply holler on Twitter @zohosocial. We'd love to hear from you!