Social Media Base

Tracked links

• The short links published on the social media point at this Odoo, so ``web.base.url`` has to be the address the social media audience can reach. Set it in Settings > Technical > Parameters > System Parameters, and add web.base.url.freeze set to True, otherwise every administrator login rewrites it with the host that was used.
• The parameter link_tracker.no_external_tracking must stay unset: with it the UTM parameters are stripped from the links pointing outside this Odoo.
• The Social Media / User: Own Accounts group is granted write access on link.tracker, which the core module only grants for reading. A user without it cannot publish a post containing a link.
• Each social media reports a UTM Medium, taken from the utm_medium_id field of its social.media record. Social Media Linkedin answers the LinkedIn medium of utm, and a social media that answers none reports the Social Media medium this module ships. No view draws the field, so a medium of its own is written from a data file.

Posts on the dashboard.

• The header of the dashboard carries Add account, which opens the list of social media to link one, and Add Post, which opens a new post, next to the Update button.

• The dashboard lists the publications that exist on the social media, together with their statistics. A scheduled publication is not online yet and a failed one never got there, so neither of them is listed: they are followed from the Posts menu, on the post they belong to, and the scheduled ones also in the calendar.

• Posts that contain a video display a video indicator on their card, and the posts kanban shows a Video (N) counter.

• Opening a single publication shows it read-only, with its account, its state, its message, its images, its videos and its statistics. A publication mirrors the social media, so nothing is written from there. The Open publication button opens it on the social media, and is only shown for a publication that got there: one that was never published, or whose publication was deleted, has no address. The address survives a deletion made on the social media, so the button asks before opening anything: one call, for the one publication being opened. The card of the dashboard asks the same way.

• A publication carries the very images and videos of its post. The post hands them over when it is sent, so a card shows them as soon as the publication exists — one that failed shows them just like one that went through — and a picture sent to several accounts is stored once, not once per account.

• A publication imported from the social media is the only one that keeps medias of its own, because it has no post to share them with. It only carries the flag saying it has a video, never the file: the video is watched on the social media.

• Posts deleted directly on the social media are marked as Deleted on <media> and kept in the dashboard as history. Opening one is what notices it here. Finding out on its own, without anybody opening anything, means reading the whole feed: that pass comes with Social Media Sync.

• Commenting a publication, answering a comment and Recommend are read from and written to the social media, so they come with Social Media Sync. Without that module the card shows neither the counters nor the entries: the footer of a card in this module carries only the campaign badge. Both the like and comment counters and the entries that write them come with that module, and only for a social media whose bridge serves them.

• Deleting a post deletes the publications it created. A post whose publications are still online cannot be deleted: remove them from the dashboard first, which deletes them on the social media as well, or archive the post to keep its history.

• Deleting a publication from the dashboard deletes it on the social media and in Odoo, and if it was the only publication of its post, the post is deleted too. To keep the history, archive the post instead of deleting its publications.

• The figures of an account card — impressions, interactions, engagement — are added up when the dashboard opens, from the daily series of the account when it has one and from the counters of its publications otherwise. It asks the social media for nothing, so opening the dashboard is free however many publications the account has.

• The engagement of a card is derived from those totals: the interactions of the account over its impressions, shown as a percentage. It is not the average of the rates of the days or of the publications, which would give a day with three impressions the same weight as a day with thirty thousand. What counts as an interaction is what the social media counts: X adds its retweets and quotes to the clicks, likes, comments and shares.

• Of the counters of a publication, the tracked clicks are the ones Odoo counts by itself: they are the clicks of the link tracker. The figures the social media reports — impressions, clicks, likes, comments, shares, engagement — are read back from it for the publications of the last 30 days, as described in Figures of a publication below, and shown in the Statistics dialog of the card. The list, the search filters and the form of a publication draw them only with Social Media Sync installed, because those views span the whole history.

• An account whose social media reports no daily figures shows on its card the totals of the publications inside that window, which is as much as can be known about it without importing its history.

  

  

Statistics.

• Go to Social Media > Statistics

• The view is a standard Odoo graph over the daily statistics of the accounts: one row per account and day, so the search panel, the group by, the comparison against the previous period or year, the favourites and the export all work as they do anywhere else in Odoo.

• The line drawn is the impressions, with one series per account. A graph draws one measure at a time, so picking Likes, Comments, Shares, Clicks or Engagement in the measure selector replaces it. The pivot view, the second one of the same action, shows the six of them together.

• The interval of the axis is the day. It is changed from Group By > Date, which offers year, quarter, month, week and day. Beware that activating a group by from the search panel replaces the one the view opens with, so switching the date to months also drops the account series: add Accounts back in the same menu to get them again.

• The counters are added up when several days are grouped together. The engagement is averaged instead, because it is a ratio the social media reports and adding ratios up means nothing.

• That average counts the days with no activity as a zero, so the wider the interval the lower it reads: a year with a handful of busy days shows an engagement close to zero even though the busy days themselves were far above it. It is the rate of the period, not the rate of the publications. Group the pivot by day to read it undiluted.

• The days a social media reported nothing for are drawn as a zero by Odoo, which is indistinguishable from a day with no activity.

• Only the social media reporting figures by day have a history to draw. The ones that only publish lifetime counters keep their figures on the card of the dashboard and draw nothing here, so an account of theirs shows the standard empty view. Each connector module documents which case it is.

  

Archive an account.

• The account is archived from the Archive entry of the Actions menu of the account form, available to the user responsible for the account.

  

• Archiving an account also archives its dashboard publications and the posts left without any active account. A post that still targets an active account stays visible, and it is archived as soon as its last account is.

• Archiving a post archives its publications too. Archived posts are found in the Posts menu with the Archived filter, and their form shows an Archived ribbon and an Unarchive button.

• Nothing is removed from the social media. The archived account shows an Archived ribbon, and the Unarchive entry of its Actions menu restores everything.

• A scheduled post whose date passed while the account was archived comes back as Draft, with the reason in its chatter: unarchiving never hands it to the scheduled action to be published on the spot. Reschedule it to publish it.

Delete an account permanently.

• The account form provides a Delete permanently button, available only to the Social Media / Administrator group. A regular user can only archive his accounts, he is not allowed to delete them.
• It deletes the account, its dashboard publications and the posts that were linked only to that account, together with their metrics and attachments. Comments live on the social media only and are never stored in Odoo, so there are none to delete.
• The records of the other applications that reference the account only lose the link, they are not deleted.
• Nothing is deleted from the social media: the publications stay online.
• This cannot be undone. To keep the history, archive the account instead.

Scheduled publishing.

• Setting Send post to Schedule proposes a date one hour from now and leaves the post in the Planned state. The date can be changed, but it has to be in the future: a post in Draft or Planned with a date already past is refused when saving, because the scheduled action would publish it right away without anybody asking for it.
• The media fields of a post accept any image in Images and any video in Videos, and a file of the wrong kind is refused when saving: the accepted formats of the file picker only filter what the browser proposes, not what a drag and drop adds. Which formats are really published is decided by each social media and described in its connector, so the same image may be accepted here and refused by the social media, which the post says as soon as the file is attached: see What the social media will refuse below.
• The check reads the file type Odoo deduces from the name of the file, so a file renamed to another extension gets through. The social media remains the last authority on what it accepts.
• A media removed from a post is not deleted on the spot: it stops belonging to the post, and the scheduled action Base: Auto-vacuum internal data deletes it a day later. Until then only the administrators see it, in Settings > Technical > Database Structure > Attachments, which is where a file removed by mistake can still be downloaded. A file attached to a post that is never saved leaves the same way.
• A media a publication still carries is never taken away: the publications of a post point at the very files of the post.
• A Planned post can be moved to Cancelled with the Cancel button, and a Planned or Cancelled post back to Draft with the Draft button. Once the post is publishing, partially published or published it can no longer be cancelled.
• A post whose accounts have been archived cannot be published: unarchive the account before pressing Post again.
• The scheduled action Social Post: Send post schedule sends the due posts every 5 minutes, so a post is published up to 5 minutes after its date.
• While the post is being sent it stays in the Publishing state.
• The scheduled action never sends a post twice: as soon as the publication is over, the post leaves the states it looks for. What happens when it does not go through everywhere is described in Partial failures below.

What the social media will refuse.

• While the post is being written, each social media of its accounts is asked what it would refuse of that post and what it would only publish differently, and the answer is shown as a block at the top of the form. The question is asked once per social media and not once per account, because what a social media refuses is a limit of the social media: every account of the same one gets the same answer.
• There are two blocks, and they do not mean the same thing. One is blocking: while it is there, no publication of that social media goes out. The other is informative: the post is published, changed by the social media — the images left behind by one that publishes the video instead, for instance — and nothing is stopped.
• Neither of them blocks saving. A post is written before it is finished, and the account raising the objection may well be removed from it a moment later, so a draft is always saved as it stands. The publication is where an objection stops something.
• The blocks are recomputed while the post is edited, from its accounts, its message, its images and its videos, and they are shown as long as the post is a draft or planned. Once it has left for the social media its content is frozen and there is nothing left to fix from the form.
• What each social media refuses is decided by its connector — how long the message may be, how many images and videos, in which formats and up to which size — and it is documented in that connector, not here. This module asks the question and shows the answer, so an account whose social media has no connector behind it is asked nothing.
• The same question is asked again when the post is sent, on each publication separately and this time naming the account that is publishing. Both sides read the same rules, so a post the form says nothing about is not stopped by a rule it never mentioned. Two things are still only known when the post goes out: a rule that is about that one account rather than about its social media, which is answered for the account that is publishing and fails that publication alone, and the length of the message that is really sent, which is measured on the publication and not on the post — a publication promoting a marketing campaign carries tracked links, frequently longer than the ones written, as described in Tracked links below.
• A publication refused that way is left as Failed with the reason on it, and the other accounts of the post go out as usual, exactly like any other partial failure. If every account was refused the post comes back to Draft, where the block is read again and the post corrected before pressing Post again. If part of it published, its content is frozen like any partially published post, so only what lies outside the post — the account itself, its authorization — can still be fixed for the accounts left behind.

Marketing campaigns.

• The marketing campaigns are reached from Social Media > Campaigns, so they can be managed without leaving the application. It is the campaign list of the whole database, the same one the other applications feed, so it also shows the campaigns created for mailings or leads.
• A user of the social media groups can create and edit them but not delete them: removing a marketing campaign is reserved to the settings administrator.
• Set Campaign on a post to attach it to one of them. The field is frozen once the post has reached a social media, like the rest of its content.
• The campaign header gets a New Post button that opens a new post with the campaign and the responsible user already filled in. It is the way to write a post already attached to the marketing campaign.
• The campaign is set on the post, never on the publication: a publication always carries the campaign of the post that produced it, and trying to change it on the publication raises an error. Only a publication imported from the social media, which has no parent post, carries a campaign of its own.

Campaign badge.

• The publications of the dashboard and of the posts kanban show the Odoo marketing campaign they belong to as a badge. Long campaign names are shortened with an ellipsis so the card keeps its shape, and the whole name is available in the tooltip.
• Clicking the badge opens that campaign in the native Odoo campaign view.
• A post without marketing campaign simply has no badge.

Follow the posts from the marketing campaign.

The Social Media tab and the Posts stat button of the campaign form belong to the Odoo marketing campaign (utm.campaign), the one shared with the mailings, the leads and the UTM tracking.

• Set Campaign on a post and it shows up on that marketing campaign right away, while it is still a draft. The publications of a post are not created until it is published, so a campaign whose posts are all planned would otherwise look empty.
• The tab opens with the two figures of the whole campaign:
  • Clicks, the field social_link_click_count, the clicks Odoo counted on the short links of the publications of the campaign.
  • Engagement, the total engagement of those publications.
• Underneath, one card per post, whatever its state:
  • The state as a badge, and the message of the post.
  • Clicks, the clicks Odoo tracked for all the publications of that post.
  • Engagement, the total of its publications. The figure of the campaign above totals the same way, so both read alike.
  • Accounts, every account the post goes out to. A post published to many accounts gets a taller card; the ones next to it keep their own height.
  • The date and the responsible at the bottom. The date is the publication date once the post is out, and the date it is scheduled for while it is not; a draft has neither, and shows none.
• The tab is read only: a post is attached to a campaign from the post itself.
• The campaign shows how much this moved, not what each social media did. The detail per account is read on the dashboard, or by opening the post, where the connector figures live. The aggregated figures the social media report are still available on the campaign in fields prefixed with social_, but no view shows them.
• The Posts stat button opens the same posts in a full view, where they can be switched between kanban, list and form.
• Both the tab and the stat button are only visible to the users of the social media groups.
• The account form gets three stat buttons: Posts, which opens the posts this account is one of the targets of; Marketing Campaigns, which opens the campaigns of its posts and of its publications; and Open account, which opens the account on the social media in a new tab, the same address the Go to account link of the dashboard carries.

Tracked links.

• When a post is sent, every link of the message of each publication is replaced by a short link of the Odoo link tracker, as long as the publication promotes a marketing campaign: tracking is what the campaign is measured with. A publication without a campaign, or whose message carries no link, is published as it is and produces no tracked link. The message stored on the publication is the one that was really published, so it is no longer identical to the message of the post.
• Each publication owns its UTM source, created the first time one of its links is tracked, so the same link published on two accounts produces two tracked links and a click can be attributed to the account it came from. The UTM medium comes from the utm_medium_id field of the social.media record: Social Media Linkedin answers the LinkedIn medium of utm, and a social media that answers none reports the Social Media medium this module ships.
• A tracked link is named after the publication that carries it, as [social media] account - beginning of the message, and not after the page it points to: what a click is attributed to is the publication. Every link of the same message shares that name, and the Target URL column is what tells them apart. Links already tracked keep the name they were created with.
• A publication shows two different click figures, which are never mixed: Tracked Clicks is what Odoo counted on its own short links, and Social Media Clicks is the figure the social media reports for the publication itself. Only the first one feeds the Clicks button of the marketing campaign.
• The same two figures exist on the post: Tracked Clicks adds up what Odoo counted for all its publications, and Clicks is what the social media report. The list of posts offers Tracked Clicks as an optional column; Clicks, the figure the social media report, is added to that list by Social Media Sync. The post form shows no click figure.
• On the campaign, social_link_click_count counts only the clicks that came from a publication. It is therefore part of the native Clicks button of the campaign, never a figure to add to it: a campaign that also tracks links outside the social media sees the difference between the two.

Partial failures.

• A post is sent to each of its accounts independently: if one account fails, the publications that already succeeded are kept, with their reference on the social media, and only the failed one is retried.
• The reason of the failure is shown on the failed publication, inside the Posts tab of the post, and is also logged in the post chatter.
• If at least one account published, the post ends in the Partially Published state. A message in the chatter names the accounts that failed and notifies the user responsible for each of them.
• A Partially Published post is never retried by the scheduled action: solve the problem and press Post again to send it to the accounts that failed. The publications already online are not sent a second time.
• Its content is frozen from that moment on: message, accounts, images, videos and schedule can no longer be changed, because they describe something that already exists on a social media. To publish something different, create a new post.
• If every account fails, nothing reached the social media: the post goes back to Draft, where it can be corrected, and it is no longer retried automatically. The corrected message is the one sent when Post is pressed again.

Expired credentials.

• The token of an account is renewed on its own before publishing, and again by the scheduled action Social: Checking social media updates, so a post planned days ago does not meet a token that ran out in the meantime.
• If the social media refuses the credentials anyway, the token is renewed and the publication is sent a second time. That answer means nothing reached the social media, so nothing can be published twice.
• When the credentials cannot be renewed at all, because the authorization was revoked or expired for good, the account is marked as needing an update: a warning on the dashboard names the account and its social media and asks for it to be authorized again, and its responsible user is told in the chatter of the account. Several flagged accounts are named in the same warning. The publication is left as failed with the reason on it, and pressing Post again works once the account is authorized.
• Completing the association wizard again is what takes the warning down, and it goes down on the spot, without reloading the dashboard. Only the account that was re-authorized loses its warning; the others keep theirs.
• Whether the account can renew its own token depends on the social media, and each connector module documents it.

Statistics of the accounts.

• The scheduled action Social: Checking social media updates rewrites the last days of the time series every two hours, on every account it can ask about: the social media revise figures of days already past, so the recent ones are asked for again instead of being trusted as final. The days before that window stay as the last pass left them. The same run also renews the credentials that are about to expire.
• The Update statistics button of the account form rewrites the same window on the spot, for whoever does not want to wait for the next pass; on a social media with no figures by day it says so instead of announcing an update.
• The Update button of the dashboard does the same over every account, and adds the figures up again afterwards. It is the only thing on the dashboard that costs a call per account, and it is meant to: a person asked for it. The same press also reads back the figures of the publications of the last 30 days, and opening a card costs the one call that asks whether that publication is still online. If no account of the dashboard reports figures by day, the Update button says there is nothing to bring in rather than announcing an update that did not happen.
• Opening the dashboard itself costs nothing at all. There is no throttle on the Update button for that reason: there is nothing to protect.
• Importing the publications an account already has and sweeping the feed for the publications deleted there are not part of this module. They cost one call per page or per publication, so they grow with the history of the account and come with Social Media Sync, together with the scheduled actions that run them.

Figures of a publication.

• The scheduled action Social: Refresh the statistics of the recent publications asks each social media, once a day, for the figures of the publications published in the last 30 days: impressions, clicks, likes, comments, shares and the engagement derived from them. What it costs does not grow with the account — it is the days of that window and not the history of the page that decide the calls — which is why it is here and not in Social Media Sync.
• Only the publications that are online are asked about. One marked as Deleted on <media> has nothing left to ask, and one without a reference on the social media was never published.
• The window is not configurable, on purpose: it is what keeps the cost of the pass bounded, and widening it would turn this module into the import it is meant to stay out of.
• The Statistics dialog of a card shows, under the figures, the moment they were read from the social media. Empty means they were never read: it is what tells a zero nobody asked about from a zero the social media reported.
• Once a day and not every two hours because the figures of a publication move slowly and the quotas are counted per day. The Update button of the dashboard and Update statistics on the account form read exactly the same window on the spot, so there is a single set to explain wherever the user presses.
• An account waiting to be authorized again spends no call in the pass: it could only answer a refusal.
• A publication older than the window keeps the last figures that were read for it, and the date says which reading they are. A publication that was already older than the window when the module was installed stays at zero: nothing ever brings it inside. Importing what an account published before Odoo knew it is what Social Media Sync is for.
• Each account is read on its own: the social media refusing one of them neither undoes the figures already written for the others nor stops the ones still to read. What each connector spends per pass, and the rate limits it has to respect, is documented in that connector.

Account ownership.

• An account is linked from Social Media > Configuration > Social Media, with the Associate account button of the social media, which opens the association wizard of its connector. The accounts already linked are listed in Social Media > Configuration > Accounts.
• Every account has a Responsible user, set to whoever linked it. A regular user of the Social Media / User: Own Accounts group only sees and manages his own accounts, their posts and statistics.
• An account also belongs to the company active when it was linked. Users only see the accounts of the companies they have access to, and relinking an account of another company answers The account … belongs to another company: activate that company first.
• Linking an account that already exists in Odoo (relinking it after archiving it, after reinstalling the connector or to renew its tokens) is restricted to that responsible user and to the Social Media / Administrator group, because it overwrites the credentials and the access tokens stored in the account.
• Accounts are recognised by the identifier they have on the social media, not by their name: renaming the account on the social media keeps the history in Odoo, and a name reused by a different account never overwrites an existing one. An account that carries no identifier is the only exception: it is looked up by its user name when it is linked again.
• If another user completes the association of an account that is not his, nothing is written and a notification explains that the account belongs to somebody else. A Social Media / Administrator may relink an account that is not his, and only the check on the company can still stop him: an account of a company he has not activated answers The account … belongs to another company.
• The Update account and Update statistics buttons of the account form are shown to the responsible user and to the Social Media / Administrator group; archiving and unarchiving are done from the Actions menu, which a user reaches on his own accounts. The credentials themselves (client keys and tokens) stay hidden from everybody but the system administrators, and the connectors read and write them internally, so an administrator of the application can renew them without ever seeing them.

Notifications you may never see.

• Update statistics answers one of two notices: that the daily figures were refreshed, or that the social media reports no figures by day and there is no history to update. The second one reaches every social media that reports no figures by day, and X is one of them: pressing Update statistics on an X account answers that there is no history to update. LinkedIn does report by day, so on a LinkedIn account the button answers the first one.

Multi-company scope of the posts.

The accounts (social.account) and their daily statistics (social.account.statistics) are the multi-company records: they carry a company and a record rule that filters them. The posts and their publications have neither a company field nor an equivalent rule, so they are only filtered by their responsible user. In a multi-company database a social media administrator therefore sees the posts of every company.

Figures older than the window

The daily refresh reads back the publications of the last 30 days, which is what keeps its cost independent of the history of the account. A publication that was already older than that when the module was installed therefore stays at zero for good: nothing brings it inside the window again. It is accurate — nobody ever asked the social media about it — but on a card it reads like a figure that failed to arrive, and there is no way from here to tell the two apart. Reading the history of an account is what Social Media Sync is for.

The figures of those views are added by that module for the same reason: the list, the search filters and the form of a publication span the whole history, where a figure inside the window sits next to one that was never read. The Statistics dialog of a card does not, and it draws them all.

Storage of the medias of a post

The images and videos of a post and of its publications are ordinary ir.attachment records, kept for as long as the record that owns them. A post published on several accounts stores each media once, because every publication points at the attachments of the post instead of copying them, and what each social media made of that media is a reference in media_refs.

What ages a media out lives in Social Media Sync, which is where the cost grows with the history of an account: it downloads a media of its own for every publication it imports, and a maximum age in days releases them. The medias of a post are out of that reach on purpose, being editorial content that a post stores once however many accounts it went to.

Inside this module the deletions are the cascade that takes the medias of a post or of a publication when the record itself is deleted, the vacuum that deletes a day later the medias a post let go of, and social.account.action_purge_account, which drops an account with its publication history. Moving those bytes out of the filestore is not something this module decides either: an external backend is configured at the level of Odoo, through ir_attachment.location, and applies to every attachment of the database.

Authors

• Binhex

Contributors

• Binhex:
  • Edilio Escalona Almira e.escalona@binhex.cloud
  • Jorge Elena Poblet j.elena@binhex.cloud
• Tecnativa:
  • Pedro M. Baeza pedro.baeza@tecnativa.com

Maintainers

This module is maintained by the OCA.

OCA, or the Odoo Community Association, is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support the collaborative development of Odoo features and promote its widespread use.

Current maintainer:

This module is part of the OCA/social project on GitHub.

You are welcome to contribute. To learn how please visit https://odoo-community.org/page/Contribute.