If you’re an IT professional looking for a Microsoft Dynamics job in the US or UK, you’re bound to be asked questions in your interview about what excites you most about Dynamics. In this four-part series, we’ll examine some of the key areas of Dynamics to show the breadth and depth of the Microsoft Dynamics development platform. In the first part of our series, we looked at Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, which lets businesses of all shapes and sizes get their message out more directly to their target audience. In this second part, we move on to look at Microsoft Dynamics’s social features. Believe us, you’re going to be surprised. The World Is Social Ok, a lot has happened in the last decade, but one thing we can all agree on is that social media has really taken over, well, everything. Whether you’re a Facebooker, a Tweeter, a SnapChatter or an instagrammer, it’s more than likely that you’re plugged into at least one of these social platforms. These days, we probably spend more time communicating online than we do with people in real life. This has had a real impact on the world of business, too. It’s now more important than ever to communicate with your customers and clients online, and it’s possibly even more important to find out how they feel about your business. After all, if you’re not sure about how they found interacting with you, you won’t be able to improve their experience. Proactivity is – after all – the name of the game when it comes to happy customers on social media. Introducing Microsoft Social Engagement   Microsoft Social Engagement allows you to listen, analyse and drive engagement all within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, or as a standalone product. What this means is that whether you’re a small business or a large global organization, you can stay one step ahead of your customers. There are three main parts to the software:

• social listening
• social analytics
• social engagement

We’ll take each of these three parts in order (…it only makes sense): Social Listening using Microsoft Social Engagement The social web is a powerful thing, and if you know how to tap into it correctly, you’ll be able to spot trends and receive alerts on how people are feeling about your product, service or brand. Of course, content comes in all forms: written, pictorial or video; it comes from all channels: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs, and it comes in all languages. Microsoft Social Engagement makes it straightforward to pick it all apart, and to extract the data you need to make sense of it all. Once you’re done listening (FYI, you’ll never be truly done listening!), you can apply all of that information to your messaging, enabling you to convert more sales. Time for Some Social Analytics   Data is a Social Media Manager’s best friend, and Microsoft Social Engagement is built from the ground up to allow you to visualize, segment and analyze all sorts of data. You can even monitor the sentiment of your social media following through a technology that combines natural language processing and machine learning techniques to evaluate keywords in posts to determine if they’re positive, negative, or neutral. Engage, Engage, Engage In sales, marketing or any other part of a business, connecting with customers is great for everybody. Using Microsoft Social Engagement, you can encourage teams to collaborate and customize streams from a variety of sources. This should allow you to develop deeper relationships with customers on Facebook and Twitter, with the end result being more sales. Great. Hopefully, we’ve explained everything you need to know about Microsoft Social Engagement and encourage you to start using it. If you still need a little bit of persuading, speak with one of our Microsoft Dynamics consultants who can help to explain the benefits. You never know, you might end up with a Microsoft Dynamics job at the end of your conversation!