The Social Accelerator Setup Guide

Transcription

1 The Social Accelerator Setup Guide Welcome! Welcome to the Social Accelerator setup guide. This guide covers 2 ways to setup SA. Most likely, you will want to use the easy setup wizard. In that case, you there s a short section just below explaining how. You essentially just need to install the plugin and then run the setup wizard. If you want (for some reason) to setup SA without the setup wizard, there are also instructions for that below in the manual setup section. Just below there is an important guide on testing and troubleshooting your setup. If you having any problems, it s highly recommended that you run through that guide. Thank your for your investment. Remember you can always reach us at support@getsocialaccelerator.com. Setup Testing & Troubleshooting There is a new helpful guide on testing your setting and troubleshooting any issues using the built-in automated troubleshooter. You can view this guide here:

2 Using the Setup Wizard Important New Feature since Version New Setup Wizard Version 1.2 and beyond of the software comes with handy setup wizard which walks you step by step through the setup process. If you want to use the wizard instead of going through the steps manually below, make sure you have at least version 1.2 or higher installed. If you ve just purchased and downloaded, you likely already have the proper version. You will find the Setup Wizard once you install the plugin, on the left menu section at the top: To make sure you have the latest version, go to the following URL, enter your JVZ purchase and download the plugin again: Simply delete the old version of the plugin and then upload and activate the new version. You will not lose any information or setup in this process - it s perfectly safe. Once you install it, on the plugins list page in Wordpress, you should see version 1.2 or higher listed.

3 Using the Setup Wizard on Existing Installations If you have already been using SA or have done a bit of setup but did not finish and now you would like to use the setup wizard, it is highly recommended that you trash your current setup and start from scratch. Depending on how you started the setup process before, the Wizard may not be able to properly run you through the setup process. To start fresh, on the Setup Wizard page, you will find a button on the bottom right that looks like this: By clicking on the button and following the instructions, it will delete all Social Accelerator data except posts it s already created (so any posts the system has created will still function after this process). This is essentially a safe reset button. Once you ve done that, then you can start the setup process via the Setup Wizard. Below can still be helpful even if you re using the new setup wizard. Doing the Setup Manually Step 1: Install SA

4 This one is easy. SA installs like any Wordpress plugin. If you need help, read the installation guide found here: Step 2: Create a New Facebook App on Facebook Go to: and login with your Facebook account. After you ve logged in, go to: At the top find Apps and then click Create a New App Enter a Display Name for your app. This can be anything. Select Apps for Pages from the drop down Category option and then click Create App.

5 Enter the following Captcha and then continue. Your app will be created and you will land on your app settings page. It will look like this:

6 Step 3: Note Down Your App ID and App Secret Click on Show (the button within the App Secret) field. You need to note down these 2 keys: App ID App Secret Put it in a notepad or text editor for later. Save them now. Step 4: Enter Your in the App Settings Now along the left side, click on Settings to go to the app settings page. Once on the settings page, find the Contact field and put in your best there: Step 5: Add Your Website URL in the App Settings Now scroll down a bit and click the Add a Platform button:

7 Then click on Website : This will insert the new website platform with an option to enter your domain. Enter your full site domain where you have Social Accelerator installed. Include The best way to do this is to go to your site s home page and then copy and paste directly from the browser address bar into Facebook: Now click Save Changes :

8 Step 6: Make Your App Available to the Public Now you still need to do one very important thing. Turn your app on and make it public. Go back to the menu on the left side and click on Status & Review : Now where you see the slider that says No, click it and turn it to Yes : This is VERY important because if you don t do this, everything SA posts to your FB page will be hidden from the public (and that defeats the purpose!). OK, that s it. You ve successfully set up your Facebook app. Notes About Facebook Apps

9 You will need to create a new one for each new domain on which you install SA. You can use the same app for all sites / installations on the same domain. Step 7: Create a New Facebook App in Social Accelerator Locate the Social Accelerator menu item in the left sidebar of the wordpress admin panel. Click on the item that says FB Apps : You will come to a settings form with three fields just page title FB Apps with a below the title: Enter a name for your app and the App ID and App Secret from when you created your app in Facebook. Remember, you were supposed to note these down. Now click Add New and Social Accelerator will add the App into the system.

10 You will now need to login to your app and set your access token in the app settings. Hover your mouse over your newly created app and click edit : It should look like this (replaced with your App ID and App Secret): Step 8: Login to Your Facebook App Along the right side, click the Please Login link. This will open in a new window or tab (depending on your browser): You will be sent to Facebook and provide a prompt that looks like this:

11 Click on Okay to login to your Facebook App. It will login and redirect you back to your own site to a page that looks like this: Do as the instructions indicate and close that window or tab. Navigate back to your WP admin where you just were. It should still look the same, like this:

12 Now simply refresh this page and those instructions to login on the right should be replaced by an access token that looks like this: Step 9: Copy Your Access Token and Save Now copy your provided access token from the field on the right (highlighted above) to the field on the left labeled Access Token. Make sure you get the entire token by clicking inside the field, right clicking and then choosing select all. Now copy and paste into the field on the left:

13 Now click the green Save button on the right side and you will have succesfully added an app into Social Accelerator. Notes About Apps in Social Accelerator Like with Facebook apps, you only need one per domain. However, you can add any number of apps you like by simply creating a new one in Facebook and then going through the above process again. If you are ever logged out of your app (can happen), you will again see the instructions along the right side to login. Before you do, remove the access token from the field on the left and save your app. This will allow Facebook to generate a new, valid access token. Step 10: Create A Page on Facebook Now we are going to create the Facebook page where content from Social Accelerator will be posted. You can of course use an existing page, just skip the page creation steps below. Go to and select the page type Brand or Product by clicking on it:

14 Select website from the category drop down and enter a name for your page. Click on Get Started. At this point, you re going to be taken through a series of prompts in a step by step manner. When you finish with this, you should end up on your newly created Facebook page.

15 Step 11: Note Down Your Facebook Page URL Look in your browser s address bar and you will find URL of your Facebook page. Note this down somewhere (notepad, text editor or other). It could look like the above with /pages/your-page-name/{a number here}

16 If this is an existing page, you might already have a Facebook page username for this page. Usually this is reserved for pages with 30 likes or more. If that s the case, your Facebook page URL will look something like this: That s OK too. Either format will work. Just note down the URL the same. Notes About Facebook Pages Make sure that you don t set any restrictions on your page by age, country or other (profanity is OK, though). If this is an existing page, check your page settings to make sure none of these restrictions are set. SA cannot use this page if it sets these kinds of restrictions. The page must be completely open and viewable by the public Now that you ve successfully created your Facebook page, we re going to move back to Social Accelerator in the Wordpress admin dashboard. Step 12: Add Your Facebook Page into Social Accelerator Locate the Social Accelerator menu item in the left sidebar of the wordpress admin panel. Click on the item that says Facebook Pages :

17 You will come to a settings page title Facebook Pages with a form with two fields just below the title: Enter a name for your page and the Facebook page URL that you noted down after creating your Facebook page. Now click Add New and Social Accelerator will add the Facebook page into the system. You will now need to grant access for your page to be managed on your behalf and set your access token in the page settings. Hover your mouse over your newly created page and click edit : It should look like this on the edit screen:

18 Step 13: Select the Facebook App for this Page and Save Along the left side, you will see a dropdown menu with all of the Facebook apps that you ve added into the SA system. Select the one that you want to use for this page and click the green Save button to the right. If you only have one app, it will be preselected. You will just need to save this page as instructed above. Once you save, you should see the instructions on right side replaced with a link to grant permissions to your page:

19 On the left side you should also see your FB Page ID field filled in automatically with a number. If you don t see this filled in, it means that SA cannot access the page - it s a permissions issue which we spoke about in step 11 under Notes about Facebook pages. Step 14: Grant Permissions to Your Facebook Page Along the right side, click the Please Grant Permissions link. This will open in a new window or tab (depending on your browser): You will be sent to Facebook and provided 3 successive prompts that look similar to this:

20 Click on Okay for EACH of them. Be careful here and be sure to click Okay and not Skip. It will finish the process of granting permissions and redirect you back to your own site to a page that looks like this: Do as the instructions indicate and close that window or tab. Navigate back to your WP admin where you just were. It should still look the same, like this:

21 Now simply refresh this page and those instructions to grant permission on the right should be replaced by an access token that looks like this: Step 15: Copy Your Access Token and Save

22 Now copy your provided access token from the field on the right (highlighted above) to the field on the left labeled Access Token. Make sure you get the entire token by clicking inside the field, right clicking and then choosing select all. Now copy and paste into the field on the left: Now click the green Save button on the right side and you will have succesfully added your Facebook page into Social Accelerator and connected it. Notes About FB Pages in Social Accelerator You can add any number of Facebook pages into the system and assign them individually to each source that you add as well. This allows you to manage multiple FB pages from one domain. You can use the same FB app for every page that you add into the system. You will only need to grant permissions once. For the rest, your app will automatically have permissions to manage that page.

23 You can disable posting to any FB page by setting it s Posting Status option to Stopped. This page will no longer be posted to by the system. At this point, you have added both a Facebook app and Facebook page into the SA system and connected them. Technically, as far as Facebook is concerned, the setup is complete. However, there are still some plugin settings that we need to take care of at this point. Step 16: Sign Up to Alchemy and Diffbot API / Enter Your Keys Locate the Social Accelerator menu item in the left sidebar of the wordpress admin panel. Click on the item that says Settings : You will come to a settings page title Setting with a table underneath the title:

24 Hover your mouse over the text Plugin Settings and click on Edit. If you attempt this and nothing happens, that likely means a poorly coded plugin that you re using alongside SA has loaded their scripts across the entire admin error, causing a conflict and our interface functionality to be broken. You will need to locate the problem plugin and disable it to use Social Accelerator. Also do everyone a favor and contact that plugin author and tell them to fix it! Once inside the plugin settings, it will look like this with 3 tabs: The first tab is called API settings. These are required for the system to work properly. Follow the provided links and sign up for each API. Each will give you a key or token. Enter it into the above corresponding field and save the settings.

25 Important Note about Diffbot: Their pricing table says 30 day trial, but is in fact free for 10,000 calls / 30 days. You will never have to pay $299/mo (the next level) to use SA, so don t worry. Alchemy has a generous free use plan as well. So there is no extra cost involved here. If anything ever changes, we will adjust the software accordingly so that you don t incur extra costs. Step 17: Set Your Processing Options You may have noticed we skipped over the 2nd tab. That s because these setting are explained within the software and they are not required. The following however is: Navigate to the third tab labeled Processing Options : These settings are important. Depending on your server, you may need to adjust these down. Shared servers usually have a strict timeout limit (how long any one script can run) of 30 seconds.

26 Social Accelerator will process as much information as the server allows it, but it needs to be able to finish! If you have a shared server and a low timeout limit, you will be able to process less data, in order to finish before the server times out. To accommodate shared servers we have added the above options to be able to reduce the amount of data the system will crunch at once. We have provided suggestions for shared server settings on the right side and set some defaults on the left. If you have a more powerful or flexible server such as a VPS or Dedicated server, you will be able put these numbers higher. You can even ask your hosting provider to raise the timeout limit to say 120 seconds (default is usually 90) or higher. Maximum I would recommend is a timeout of 300 seconds (5 minutes). Basically the higher your timeout limit, the more data the system can process, the higher you can set the above settings. It all depends on your individual server. If you re not sure, ask your hosting provider what your timeout limit is and if you can raise it or not. Set the values that best fit your situation and save the settings.

27 At this point, most of the technical setup is done. Just one last thing to do. Step 18: Set Up Your System Cron Job Now the last thing you ll need to do is set up what s called a cron job so that Social Accelerator can run and do it s magic on a schedule. Under the Processing Options tab in the Social Accelerator settings you ll find a field called Cron Job URL. A cron job is something is meant to run at a certain interval. In this case a script which tells Social Accelerator to do stuff like discover new content, create posts on your site and post stuff to Facebook. Mosts hosts with Cpanel allow you to setup cron jobs through your hosting account. That is one option and if you want to do this, contact your host and ask them about setting it up. Another option is to use an online cron job service. This makes it really easy to set up, and it s free. I use and recommend: Simply copy your Cron Job URL from Social Accelerator and then create SetCronJob free account.

28 Once inside, click on the big green button labeled Create CronJob. Fill in the options with the following: The three items pointed out above are the only things you need to change. Paste in your Cron Job URL from SA Select every hour for the interval For the minute, select 5 - nothing else Leave everything else default Now go down to the bottom and save you cron job. When finished, you should see the new cron job in your list. It should be activated. To make sure it s activated, look for the pause icon. This means it s running. If you ever want to temporarily stop it from running you can pause it:

29 Congrats! You ve finished setup, now you can start building your empire! That wasn t too painful was it? Additional Testing & Troubleshooting Once you ve setup the plugin either via the Setup Wizard (recommended) or manually, you will want to run the below tests to make sure the plugin is functioning as it should. #1 - Run the Troubleshooter for Common Issues This is a step in the Setup Wizard but if you set up manually, you will need to remember to do this. You should do this BEFORE and AFTER your setup. Some issues may need to be fixed before you complete the setup. To run the troubleshooter, make sure you have at least version 1.2 or higher and find the troubleshooter link the SA admin menu: Before Setup Before setup, pay special attention to these results:

30 (these may change or look slightly different) Clear up any issues found under these headings (server, wordpress, critical functions) and then continue with setup. After Setup After you ve completed setup, run the troubleshooter again to check any potential issues with your setup. For example it will tell you if a source you ve chosen is low quality, if your FB app isn t properly connected and many more things - along with how to fix each.

31 Clear up any issues that the troubleshooter brings up. If you need help, please write to support. #2 - Run A Content Test On the sources page of the SA admin menu, you will find the test source content button. Locate the button labeled Test Source Content and click it to run a test of whether the system is properly set up to pull in content from your Facebook source (if you ve followed everything above it should be!) Give it some time to go and search the content and return. When it does, it should return a table of content like this:

32 If it does, that means the system is all set to pull in content. If It Gets Stuck... Now if it gets caught on the Retrieving Source Content... prompt and doesn t update after at most seconds, that means there is problem - usually that the server timed out before finishing. Please review your processing options (as covered in step 17 of this guide), adjust them lower and then try the test again. If No Content Comes Back... If it comes back but with no content, that means there is a problem in your Social Accelerator app settings. Locate the app you added to Social Accelerator and you chose for this source and verify that: Your App ID and App Secret keys are correct The app is logged in You ve properly copied, pasted and saved the access token from Facebook These are usually the only problems that could arise. These are all also issues that the troubleshooter tool would have already alerted you to. Checking for Plugin Conflicts

33 If you have tried these 2 things and still cannot get it, one last thing to try is to disable all other plugins than Social Accelerator. Other poorly coded plugins can load their scripts on the Social Accelerator plugin settings pages. This is against Wordpress coding best practices and can cause conflicts with Social Accelerator if it s the case. These conflicts can cause Social Accelerator not to function properly. To fix this and find the culprit plugin, use the following steps: Disable all plugins other than Social Accelerator Go back and try to run the content test again. If it works this time, continue with the following steps. If it still doesn t work, contact us at support (support@getsocialaccelerator.com), following the support contact instructions below. Since it s working now, reactivate each plugin one by one, running the content test each time. When it stops working again, you will know that the last plugin you just reactivated is the problem plugin. Deactivate it and continue going through the list activating plugins and testing again. It could be that several plugins cause a conflict. Once finished, note the plugins that are causing conflicts. At this point I recommend you contact the plugin author and ask them to follow best Wordpress plugin coding practices and fix their plugin! Support Contact Instructions for Best Service Contact us at letting us know that you ve followed the troubleshooting guide and are still having problems. We will login and fix it for you (or try). To do this and get the fastest service, it s best to provide us with a WP admin login and a cpanel login when you contact us.

34 That way, we don t have to respond and ask for it and we can get straight to work. If you run the test and it pulls back content just fine, it s time to move on to the next text. Test Posting to Facebook In this test, we want to make sure that the system is properly posting to your Facebook page. On the sources page, just under where you tested the content, you will find the section called Add a Link Manually :

35 This is going to allow us to test posting a link to our Facebook page (and running it through the system as if it was discovered by Social Accelerator). So enter the URL (including into the Content URL (link) field. Enter CNN as the Source Name. Choose one of your sources that you ve added during setup as the proxy source.

36 Make sure Publish to FB is set to Yes. Optionally, you can enter a custom message to be posted with it. At a minimum it should look like this: Please note the proxy source choice will look different depending on the sources you have set up in your system. Choose one that you have set up. We happen to have CNN set up as a source. You do not need to setup CNN as a

37 source to do this test. You can use any one of the sources you ve added as the proxy source, just to be clear. If everything looks good and you re ready, click the Add New Content button. It should change to show Creating Content... And then once it s done, it will update with a message (either a success message or an error message). If it was a success, you will see this: If there was an error, you will see some variation or form of the following.

38 This may look like a bunch of jibberish but it ll actually pinpoint exactly what went wrong. In the above case, you see the words alchemy fail. This is just one example of a few things that can go wrong, but this means that you forgot to enter and save your Alchemy API key as described in step 16. Support Contact Instructions for Best Service If you get an error instead of a success, copy the given log and paste it into a support , contacting us at support@getsocialaccelerator.com. We will be able to tell you exactly what went wrong and give you a solution. You will still want to include a WP admin login and cpanel login so that if we can t determine the issue from the log, we can login and check it out for you. This saves us both time!

39 If the post was successful however, you should now check your Facebook page and make sure that the new piece of content appears on your page. Only in very rare cases will the system tell you successful and the post not show up in Facebook. And in this case, you will need to contact support and explain that you ve done the test, got a success message but nothing got posted on Facebook. Don t forget to include a WP admin login and cpanel login! Conclusion If at this point both tests have passed, you can be pretty confident the system is set up and working perfectly. If you have any comments or suggestions to improve this guide, please send them to support@getsocialaccelerator.com - we appreciate the feedback!