In this video, as a SharePoint Site Member or Teams Member, you’ll learn how to Create Topics and Reply to Topics using Social Squared.
Creating a Topic
To Add a new Topic, first, navigate to the most relevant forum to the topic you are creating. Then, click the Add new Topic button.
On the Topic creation page, you must provide a subject and a body for your topic. The Rich Text toolbar helps you to format and style your topic, add images, video links, and more.
You can also Tag your post, which will help people find your topic using the Tag Cloud. The tags are very similar to a hashtag within Twitter or LinkedIn.
Rich Text Tool Bar
The Rich Text Toolbar options are described from left to right below:
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- Styling for Headers/Paragraph
- Font selection
- Font size
- Font Colour
- Font Background Colour
- Source – toggle between a visual editor and an HTML editor.
- Insert code in a block for discussion, such as HTML, JavaScript, Python etc.
- Bold
- Italic
- Underline
- Text Alignment
- Strikethrough
- Hyperlink
- Bullet Point List
- Numbered List
- Insert Table
- Insert link to video URL such as YouTube video link.
- Insert/Upload Image (Note that an image can also be copied/pasted)
- Block Quote – Useful for inserting a comment
- Undo
- Redo
- Insert Image via URL
- Insert Emoji
- Embed external content in an iframe
Tags
After composing your Topic, you can tag it so that users can find your post more easily through search and the tag cloud view in Social Squared. To help with tag consistency, Social Squared will suggest tags that have already been used for similar content within the Forums. You can select these suggestions to use as a tag against your post, or you can type your own tag. When typing your own tag, other suggestions may appear based on what you typed. Press Enter after typing a tag, and then you can add another tag.
When you have finished composing your message, can click Add to add the new topic. In the next section, we will explore replying to topics.
Note: When you create a new topic with a new subject, Social Squared may offer existing topics that are a potential match for the topic that you are about to create. To save duplicating a question, it may be worth reading those topics to see if they are similar in content to what you were about to post. This could save you some time, and you may find the answer to your question without creating a new topic.
Replying to a topic
When you wish to reply to an existing topic, you can simply click the Reply button below the main topic post or below someone else’s reply. You can create a straightforward reply or reply with a quote that will embed the message that you are responding to within your reply.
When replying, you will also be able to use the Rich Text formatting, tag your reply, and attach files.
Note: To Reply with Quote, click the ellipsis next to the Reply button and select ‘Reply with Quote’.
If you don’t see a Reply button, it is possible that the Topic has been locked. Locking a topic is performed by the Moderator or Administrator of your SharePoint Site/Forum.
Attaching files
Files can be attached to a New Topic, or to a Reply to a Topic. You can attach a file by clicking the ‘Attach Files’ button at the bottom of the post. Your administrator may have refined the types of files that can be attached, and they may have set a file size limit. To add the file attachment:
- Drag the file into the ‘Drop files here’ section. Or:
- Click the ‘Drop files here’ section and browse to the file that you wish to attach.
Tagging content
Tagging your post with descriptive tags makes it easier for other people to find your posts. In some respects, it is very similar to using hashtags on Twitter or LinkedIn. Your post will contain a subject and a body. The content inside the subject and the body is searchable from within Social Squared, but using Tags to further describe your post means that terms that don’t actually appear in your post itself could still be used as a means to make it searchable. The tags will also display in the tag cloud view of Social Squared, which is a great way to navigate to posts of a similar nature.
Take, for example, the below post about a Dying Orchid. The word “Indoor Plant” doesn’t appear in the subject or the body of the post. Including ‘Indoor Plants’ as a tag would mean that the post would be returned as a result should someone search ‘Indoor Plant’ or navigate to the ‘Indoor Plants’ tag.
Some tags may be suggested to you. The suggestions are tags that were used by other people in their posts when their posts contained similar content to yours. To accept a suggestion, simply click the tag.
Social Squared can be configured to use a Managed Set of terms by your organization. In that case, when choosing a tag, you would choose the closest match to describe the content of your post.