New at Yext

Here are release notes for the latest features and enhancements from Yext (formerly Hearsay Systems). Click Subscribe to Updates to have future updates delivered to your inbox.

a year ago

October 2023 Product Release

Here's what's in the October 2nd release: 

Social 

  • Use Generative AI to create posts 🔷 
  • Advisor/agent Post Library navigation refresh 🔷 
  • Public Comments page is being sunsetted 🔷 
  • Receive helpful Twitter error messages instead of a generic error
  • New Homepage notification displays if Instagram DM access is disabled 
  • Archive or ignore LinkedIn Recruiter and Sales Navigator InMail messages via a new admin setting 

Relate

  • Admin-managed Message Templates 🔷 

Platform

  • New login page experience 🔷 (preview instructions are in the release note)

Actions 

  • Actions prompt feedback API 🔷 
  • Actions Workspace Management tool for admins 🔷 

Data & Analytics 

  • Post All Data report includes posts published as Instagram Stories and associated metrics
  • Breakdown by Workspace report includes top interest categories for advisor/agents and their audience
  • Post All Data report flags posts originating from Content+
  • Contact Form Submission All Data report includes the Sites lead source

🔷Sandbox preview available. Contact your Customer Success Manager for more information.

Social 

Use Generative AI to create posts

Original content performs significantly better than suggested library content, and helping advisors/agents create more original content with less effort saves time and helps increase engagement.

A new Generative AI solution helps advisors/agents create more original content by generating descriptions for posts on any of their social media accounts. The tool works as follows:

  1. The user selects the parameters of a post description, such as the tone, length, and required words and phrases. The user can add their own words and phrases to be included in the post description, or select from a list of suggested words and phrases generated for them based on recently popular posts among their peers. 
  2. Hearsay sends a prompt to Jasper, our secure third-party AI partner, with the specified requirements, and the engine sends back a complete post description. We will never send customer data to Jasper, we only send the specifications for the post description. 
  3. The advisor/agent can select from different versions of the description, add images and links, or make edits before publishing.

Note: Generative AI is currently only available in English.

To see how to generate a post description, see Creating a post description with Generative AI. 

To learn more about how the AI works, see How does Generative AI work?

Create a New Post with AI workflow

Post description example


Review and Publish page


This feature is off by default. To turn it on, or to enable the sandbox preview, contact your Customer Success Manager.  

After Hearsay turns the feature on for your organization, you can enable it in the new AI tab. For complete instructions, see Enabling Generative AI.

Generative AI setting

Advisor/agent Post Library navigation refresh

The Post Library contains several tabs: Recommended, Browse, Prereleased, Campaign, Scheduled, Published, Promoted, Denied, and Pending. However, the large number of tabs creates confusion, and improving the organization and layout of the tabs improves usability and creates a smoother and faster journey from post selection to publication.

To improve the user experience, all the tabs currently in the Post Library have been merged into four tabs: 

  • Explore: A renamed tab that displays released and pre-released organization posts.

    • A new Status filter and a Soon label on pre-released posts allow users to filter for and differentiate between Soon and Released posts.

  • My Posts: A new tab that contains scheduled, published, pending, and denied posts.

    • Within the Scheduled and Published categories, there is a new Campaign label on posts that are scheduled to be published or already published by a campaign to make a distinction between the posts the advisor/agent publishes by themselves vs. by campaign automation.
  • Recommended: An existing tab that is visible for organizations that allow AI-powered post recommendations.
  • Promoted: An existing tab visible for those organizations that allow publishing promoted posts on Facebook.

Explore tab

My Posts tab

Public Comments page is being sunsetted

To simplify the user experience, The Public Comments page, along with its related functionalities, is being removed from the Hearsay Social product. Users can now view and respond to comments on the Published Posts tab.

Receive helpful Twitter error messages instead of a generic error

Instead of showing the vague error “Posting content to Twitter has failed” for any publishing error that occurs on Twitter’s (X’s) side, Hearsay now displays a more helpful error message specific to the problem.

Sample error

New Homepage notification displays if Instagram DM access is disabled

Hearsay users can disable Hearsay’s ability to crawl for and capture Instagram DMs by changing a setting in the Instagram app, and Hearsay cannot override the setting, even when Instagram DMs are configured to be captured at the org level. To prevent compliance gaps and ensure Hearsay can save Instagram DMs, Hearsay now generates a Recommended Actions item on the user’s Homepage that notifies them that this setting is against their organization’s compliance policy and gives them a link to an article that explains how to fix it.

Setting in Instagram

Recommended Action item

Archive or ignore LinkedIn Recruiter and Sales Navigator InMail messages via a new admin setting

To allow organizations more control over whether LinkedIn Recruiter and Sales Navigator InMail messages are saved to the archive or not, Hearsay has added the option to archive or ignore either type of message. 

To change the settings:

  1. Under Organization Settings, click the Review & Archive tab. 
  2. In the Social Activities section, click LinkedIn. 
  3. Under Private Messages, the new Sales Navigator and Recruiter InMail settings can be switched to Archive or Ignore. 

If the Private Messages setting is changed from Ignore to Archive, the Sales Navigator and Recruiter InMail settings automatically change back to the last configuration before the Private Messages setting was set to Ignore. The setting only applies to incoming DMs. If a Hearsay user replies to a Sales Navigator or Recruiter InMail message, their reply will still be sent to archives regardless of whether the setting was set to Ignore or not.

Settings page

Relate

Admin-managed Message Templates

Message templates allow users to save time when sending the same message to different clients. Administrators can now create message templates, allowing them to draft consistent messages that align with their organization's best practices, and helping them reduce the time advisors/agents spend creating the same message content. Advisors/agents can access available templates in the Relate message composer. 

A new menu item is available in the admin view’s side navigation panel called Templates, where admins can view, create, and delete message templates. The Templates tab contains a message template library that shows message template cards containing individual template's title, textual content, and creation date and time.

Advisors/agents can view, select, edit, send, or schedule to send admin-created message templates from their Relate message composer.

Message templates will only be available in the Relate web platform initially. Administrators can create a maximum of 20 templates. Templates have 1600 character limit. Templates apply to the entire org and they cannot be restricted/enabled by hierarchy.

To learn more about creating message templates, see Creating and Managing Text Message Templates.

To learn more about using templates to send text messages, see Using Text Message Templates.

Message Template library in the admin-view

Message Template composer

Message Template drawer in the Relate message composer

Platform

New login page experience

A new login page has been introduced, providing a cleaner and more seamless experience to access Hearsay via SSO. The login via Facebook and LinkedIn buttons have been removed from the login page, and instead users are first prompted to enter their registered email address and a link to the authentication page is sent to that email address. The authentication page contains options to use SSO, Facebook, or LinkedIn to login, however the user is only presented with those options that they have available, based on their organization’s configuration. For example, if the user’s organization only has SSO available, then the authentication page will only show them the SSO option. After selecting their method of authentication, all further login steps remain the same.

This update does not change any of our supported authentication methods, it only changes how we present these authentication methods to our users. Organizations that use a URL redirect to an SSO will continue to be able to do so.

To preview the new login experience before it goes live on October 2nd:

  1. Visit https://login.hearsaysocial.com/v2/, add your registered email address, and click Continue. You will receive an email with a URL to log in.
  2. Copy the login URL and paste it in a new tab in your browser, then add /v2/ before your ORG_ID in the URL. The login link should look like https://login.hearsaysocial.com/v2/[YOUR ORG_ID]. 

New login pages

Actions

Actions prompt feedback API

A new Actions API is replacing the current API, which doesn’t provide mandatory validation and prompt feedback when the sent record contains invalid fields. The new Actions API provides fast and accurate feedback to external systems about the success or failure of the record insertion, creating faster time to value and making it easier to make data corrections.

The new API has backward-compatible insertion payload and format, and accepts the same API token as the existing Actions API. However, the new API has a different URL. 

There will be a six-month grace period from the day of release (October 2nd) where existing Actions customers can switch to the new API, and after the grace period, the old Actions API will be disabled. 

To learn more about the transition process and set a date to begin the migration, or to enable the sandbox preview, contact your Customer Success Manager. 

Actions Workspace Management tool for admins

To enable admins to have more control over Actions workspaces and more efficiently resolve advisor/agent change requests, a new Workspace Management tool allows admins to activate and deactivate Actions workspaces and provision selected workspace-specific parameters via the Administration view in Hearsay Desktop. Here is a complete list of capabilities admins have with the new Actions Workspace Management tool:

  • Obtain a workspace owner’s contact information from existing Hearsay profiles.
  • Activate and deactivate Actions workspaces.
  • Add, delete, and modify selected parameters of Action workspaces
  • Add external IDs to a workspace. A maximum of 50 external IDs can be added to a workspace.
  • Filter for inactive, active, and deactivated workspaces
  • Search for Action workspaces. Search is case-sensitive and works in text and numeric fields like name, email, phone number, reference ID, or external ID.

This feature is off by default. To turn it on, or to enable the sandbox preview, contact your Customer Success Manager.  

Filtering and searching

Managing Actions-specific workspace data

Data & Analytics

Post All Data report includes posts published as Instagram Stories and associated metrics

The Post All Data report now includes posts published as Instagram Stories, as well as their associated impressions and engagements. The Publish Type field of the Post All Data report displays the value Story for all Instagram Stories. The impression metric of the Instagram Story appears in the Num.Impressions field and the reply metric appears in the Num.Comments field. 

Post All Data report with the new Publish Type field


Breakdown by Workspace report includes top interest categories for advisor/agents and their audience

Previously advisor/agents’ and their audience’s top interests were only available on the Social Insights for advisors dashboard. These will now also be visible to administrators in the Breakdown by Workspace report. The Breakdown by Workspace report is extended with 2 new fields: “Advisor’s Top Interest” and “Audience’s Top Interest”. These fields display the top interest categories for advisor/agents (based on their historically published posts), and the top interest categories for the advisors/agent's audience (based on their engagements with posts). This information will be available at the individual workspace level.

Breakdown by Workspace report with top interest categories

Post All Data report flags posts originating from Content+

Administrators can track the number of posts originating from Content+ at the individual post level, allowing them to see if a specific post came from Content+. This information about post origins is available in the Post All Data Report, which has a new Origin field with 2 possible values: 

  • Own: indicating that the post originated from the organization’s content library 
  • Content+: indicating that the post originated from Content+

Post All Data report showing origins of posts

Contact Form Submission All Data report includes the Sites lead source

Hearsay Sites administrators can now see if leads are originating from Sites Events RSVPs or if leads are originating from contact forms on Sites pages. This information about lead sources is available in the Contact Form Submission All Data report, which has a new Event RSVP field with 2 possible values:

  • TRUE: indicating that the lead came from an Event RSVP
  • FALSE: indicating that the lead came from a contact form on a Sites page

Contact Form Submission All Data report with Sites lead source information