Announcing Automatic Social Steps in the Sequence [Reply Updates]

Olivia Milton 09 Jun 2022

It’s been a while since we announced the official Social Automations wait list back in February.

But if you’ve been following the news from Ukraine, you’ll know we’ve been a little busy over here. For a while, we had to focus on keeping our product operational with no disruptions and the usual quality of support. So development of the new features took a back seat for a while.

Now, that we’re all relatively safe and have adapted to the new normal, we can’t keep you waiting to get your hands on this amazing addition to our platform.

So here it is, the official launch of the Social Automations in Reply (+ some extra updates)!

Automatic Social Steps in the Sequence (Beta)

Your sales engagement sequences are about to become even more effective (and your life as an SDR — a bit easier) with the automated social media touchpoints in Reply. The feature is currently in Beta and will soon be available to all users.

This means you will be able to put your touchpoints within the platform on autopilot for more impact with minimum effort.

Important: To start using Automatic Social steps, you should first connect your social media account with an automatic session cookie (required Reply Chrome Extension). Don’t worry, it’s easy to do with the detailed instructions.

Once you connect your account to Reply, you can use get the most out of your social steps in the sequence with a variety of available automatic touchpoints. These include:

Message – to send a direct message to your prospect (up to 8,000 symbols) to your 1st-degree connections.
Connect – to send a connection request with a short message (up to 300 symbols) to your 2nd and 3rd degree connections.
View Profile – to view the prospects’ profiles to draw their attention to you.
Like Recent Posts – to interact with the content published by the prospect.

Two more touchpoint types – InMail and Sales Navigator Connect – will be added with the future updates.

Ready to automate your social touchpoints?

Get started

The price for social media automation is US $49 per account. To try the automation, please make sure you have a Beta mode activated in your Reply account.

Please note that there’s a default limit of 30 messages/detects/connections per day or until you hit the weekly limits.

To add an automatic Social Step to your sequence, follow these simple instructions:

Open an existing sequence or create a new one.
Navigate to the Steps tab and click on the + button to add a new step.
Choose the Social step type and switch to the Automatic option in the dropdown.
Pick a suitable type of touchpoint from the dropdown on the right.
Depending on the type of touchpoint you choose, proceed to create the step accordingly.
Remember to save the step when you’re done editing it.

Once you launch the sequence and your Social steps start processing, you will be able to monitor the progress, including the new replies, in the Prospect Card (the right sidebar on the People tab). You can also get brief updates in the Log tab within your Sequence.

Learn more about getting started with the Automatic Social Media steps in Reply here.

Safety limits and filters with Automatic Social steps

Yet, to make sure you enjoy your experience with social touchpoints automation and get the best possible results using these steps in your sequences, there are several things to keep in mind.

First, you should consider safety limits for Automatic social steps to avoid blacklisting. These include the total daily interactions, connections & messages, and replies detection limits.

By default, the maximum daily limits are set by the Reply algorithm, which constantly monitors the overall performance and safety of your accounts. However, you can also monitor the usage of safety limits by yourself and set your own limits as needed. You can do that in the Settings → Social Account.

You can find more information on the limits and best practices in this post.

For your convenience we’ve also added Smart Filters so you can sort the prospects by connection status. As a result, you can filter out the prospects already in your network into a separate group and skip the Connection touchpoint to move them right to the next steps in your Sequence.

Reply will automatically check the status of all of your contacts several times per day, so you know this info is always up to date. This is a good way to optimize your sequence with automatic social steps.

On top of that, if a contact replies to your outreach via social media (including the automatic social touchpoints), Reply will detect the reply and assign the Replied status to this contact. So you can also filter out these contacts using Smart Filter.

To access the Smart Filters, go to the Sequence page → click on the required sequence → People tab.

Read more about how replies handling works with Social Automation in this article.

One-Shot Email and Prospect Card updates (out of Beta)

Along with the long-awaited Social Automation, we’re happy to announce a bunch of improvements that are out of Beta. Here’s the overview of the features you can now use in Reply:

Manual (one-shot) emails stats in the Prospect card. This allows you to see if a prospect interacted with your email and in what way so you can adjust your further steps in the sequence accordingly.
Opens/links tracking in one-shot emails. You can now turn it on/off as you see fit to minimize the risk of deliverability issues when sending outreach emails.
Limit the # of same domain prospect receiving emails per day. This allows you to control the number of prospects within a single organization you contact every day and run your account-based campaigns without looking spammy or aggressive.
Track the delay between the steps. With the improved ability to track the delay between the steps within the Sequence, it’s easier to plan ahead and understand when the prospect finishes the Sequence.

Stay tuned for more

These are the most important Rely updates to date. Be sure to take them for a spin and let us know what you think. Also, feel free to reach out to support if you need any help.

We’ll be back with more amazing features and improvements in the coming weeks!