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Social Media Integration & Cross-posting - News Feed
Idea shared by Ricky Brown - 7/19/2018 at 10:24 AM
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With social media being the largest outlet for most agencies these days, I feel a website is still very important for the public to obtain contact information and other information about a department.
 
With that said, I would like to propose the addition of the option to replace the traditional Firehouse Solutions news feed with a news feed that pulls news contents (text, images, video) from the department's social media page and displays it on their Firehouse Solutions site where news stories are currently displayed.  While this may pose some deeper issues/questions such as what to do about news archives (which I am a fan of for historical/research use), it is unfortunately the direction in which technology is pulling.
 
I feel this feature is very beneficial as I would plan to use it with social media cross-posting and not have to take the time to log in and copy a paste a story from let's say Facebook.  If set up properly with all of your agencies social media accounts, you could quickly make a post on Twitter which would then cross-post everywhere else including your fire department website.
 
Social media integration and streamlining processes and workflow will be important for future web development.
 
 

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Ron Raley Replied
7/19/2018 at 10:31 PM
Employee Post
I assume it would depend on how much weight was placed on social media versus an official website.
 
The three major social media networks in my opinion are Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I think they are all facing a major problem. Many citizens ditch, avoid, distrust, or ignore all these platforms. Social media is creating it's own stigma.
 
We cannot hide our biased view, which is to simply consider a website as the primary and official communication tool to manage all information and data. Then, pushing this information and data to social networks.
Ron Raley Firehouse Solutions P.O. Box 911 Leonardtown, MD 20650 Office: 301-475-1900 Email: Ron@FirehouseSolutions.com
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Ron would it be possible to go in the opposite direction ie: post to web site and it goes to social media. As it is now a lot of the times I post the same info on both with a link back to the web site for more info. 
 
Jerry
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Ron Raley Replied
7/25/2018 at 10:07 PM
Employee Post
Yes, we do believe that making this process autonomous would be helpful for customers.

We currently have Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus sharing icons built-into News Management. Do you guys currently use these?
Ron Raley Firehouse Solutions P.O. Box 911 Leonardtown, MD 20650 Office: 301-475-1900 Email: Ron@FirehouseSolutions.com
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Ron,

I agree that a website is and should be the primary/official communication tool for departments. Autonomy/efficiency in posting may be a better goal as posting independently to our website and social media accounts can be time consuming, especially if you are out on an incident and want to get information out fast. We have also noticed that we often seem to get more interaction on social media if it is posted directly in a social media app versus a link back to our website.
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Ron Raley Replied
10/3/2021 at 1:13 AM
Employee Post
We have deployed an "Auto-Post News to Facebook" app.  This can be found under Website Management > News Management.

We are actively working on an "Auto-Pull News from Facebook" app.  The Facebook Developer API changes versions often which creates some difficulty following the new requirements and security settings

We have tested Auto-Push.  However, we want some of our customers to test it as well.  Firehouse Solutions will announce these new features to all customers once we are confident that all code is secure and working correctly without error.

Thank you!
Ron
Ron Raley Firehouse Solutions P.O. Box 911 Leonardtown, MD 20650 Office: 301-475-1900 Email: Ron@FirehouseSolutions.com
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We like the ability to autopost to Facebook to reach out audience; Is there any chance that we will see this expand to Instagram/Twitter?
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Ron Raley Replied
1/31/2023 at 9:31 PM
Employee Post
Michael, this is certainly a possibility. One hurdle is the number of characters accepted in a Tweet.  We will look into these platforms.
Ron Raley Firehouse Solutions P.O. Box 911 Leonardtown, MD 20650 Office: 301-475-1900 Email: Ron@FirehouseSolutions.com
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