Frequently Asked Questions

 

How do I get Toucan? How do I use Toucan?

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I can't login to Twitter! Toucan tells me Login Failed when I enter my twitter ID!

Try one of the following:

  • Make sure you configured the Remote Site Settings in Salesforce as described in the install docs under Post-Installation Configuration. This is required for Toucan to function.
  • Login with your twitter id without the @ sign, not your email address. (ex: toucancrm)
  • You must click the button "Save Login Details" rather than pressing Enter. Salesforce does not recognize the enter button on custom apps. Pressing Enter will simply reload the page and do nothing. This is true on every Toucan screen.
  • As a test, the Toucan Search tab does not require any twitter credentials. If the search does not work, you probably do not have the remote site settings configured correctly.

How do I keep up-to-date with my customers and leads with Toucan? 

You can keep up with your contacts in one of several ways. We  have created a custom field (Twitter ID) on the contact and lead records. Your first step will be to link the contact or lead with their twitter ID. Some ideas on how to do that include:

  • You can modify your web/email to lead forms to capture it.
  • You can try using the search page but typically it is hard to find someone on twitter as it's fairly anonymous.
  • You can run a mass email promotion of some type asking leads to send their twitter ID via email or you can create automated web form that populates the twitter ID field.
  • We working on ways to auto-link the contact or lead from the main Toucan application.

Now that you have their twitter ID, you can keep up with them is several ways:

  • You can follow them from your twitter ID like you usually would on twitter.com.
  • You can click the button in the Toucan application that says "Show Other User" and enter their twitter ID.
  • You can add their twitter ID to the Toucan Host List. The Hot List is a listing of up to 10 IDs you want to keep closer track of. The posts from all people on your hot list will be displayed at once in the Hot List tab. We will be adding the ability to have multiple hot lists. *See the note below regarding rate limiting.
  • If you modify the page layout as described in the installation stesps, you then can view your contact's or lead's twitter posts directly on their salesforce record page.
  • You can save a tweet as an activity on the contact or lead record so you can always save something important that the person said on twitter.

We initially built a module to automatically search for particular twitter IDs or common phrases even when you are not logged in to Salesforce. Unfortunately, Salesforce does not allow an application to make a request to a 3rd party (like twitter) when you are not logged in. We can provide this functionality via a hosted service and link the results with Toucan. Because the automated search tool will need to run on another hosting provider, we will have to charge an additional yearly fee for that service.

Can I link my contacts and twitter followers in bulk?

We're working on ideas to do some type of auto-sync, but nothing production-ready yet. The challenge is that you can not use the twitter people search through 3rd party applications. Even if you could, many people use twitter handles that don't relate to their name, making fuzzy matching nearly impossible.

We have some alternatives:

  • As you see your current followers, simply click the "link user" link and over time you'll build your linkages.
  • Use the Toucan Search tab to try and find people by name or keywords. You can then link and follow within Toucan
  • If you have many known twitter IDs, create a new Contact View in salesforce that includes the twitter ID. If you have enabled inline editing, you can add them in bulk.

What about Rate Limiting? What does that mean?

Twitter places a limit on the number of requests any twitter application can make every hour. That limit is 100 requests per hour. Each time you refresh the timeline in Toucan, it counts as a request. When you refresh the Hot List, you make one request per ID in the list. So if your host list has 10 people in it, you will make 10 requests with each refresh. Once you hit the 100/hr limit, you will have to wait until twitter lets you continue. Searches and posting updates are NOT subject to the rate limits.

I get an error message about licenses. What does that mean ?

As with any package, after installing, you will need to assign user licenses to the users you want to be able to use Toucan. This is done under Setup->View Installed Packages.

How do I track metrics on the Twitter posts?

If you register to track metrics on your short URLs with http://bit.ly, enter your bitly user ID and API Key on the settings page. When you create a Tweet Campaign, you can then shorten your URL with bit.ly. Bit.ly will track the click-through rates and Toucan will retrieve those when you click Refresh Stats. Salesforce CRM does not allow Toucan to automatically refresh stats, you must manually refresh bit.ly statistics.