Setting up your Twitter channel

Your Zendesk can monitor one or more Twitter accounts and convert tweets to tickets as needed. All tweet activity between agents and Twitter users is added as ticket comments. Using the Twitter channel, you can do the following:

• Create Twitter searches using keywords to monitor references to your business, products, and services
• Use your saved searches to convert tweets to tickets and retweet messages
• Convert a tweet into a ticket and respond to the user with a tweet, a direct message, or move the conversation to email
• Bulk convert multiple tweets into tickets in one step
• Convert tweets to tickets outside of Zendesk by favoriting a tweet in twitter.com and many other Twitter clients
• Automatically capture public mentions and direct messages as tickets
• Append ticket links to outgoing tweets
• Select which of your accounts agents are allowed to use when sending outgoing tweets

Only administrators have access to the incoming tweets; however, once they've been converted to tickets all agent types have access to them unless you've otherwise restricted their access to certain types of tickets (by restricting them to an organization, or by customizing Enterprise agent roles to exclude this permission, for example).

Tickets created from tweets are also referred to as twickets and you'll see that word used in our documentation as shorthand for 'tickets created via a tweet'. It's important to note however that once a tweet becomes a ticket it behaves just like any other ticket in your Zendesk. The one exception to this is that you have a number of Twitter specific options for replying back to the Twitter user. You can reply with a public tweet or your reply can be a direct message, which is private message back to the user.

Topics covered in this article:

• How tweets become tickets
• Adding Twitter accounts to your Twitter channel
• Viewing your twickets
• Appending ticket links to outgoing tweets
• Creating and managing saved searches
• Managing twickets with business rules
• Understanding why your Twitter channel might be deauthorized

To monitor tweets and convert them to tickets, see Using your Twitter saved searches to monitor and manage tweets.

How tweets become tickets

You can control if and how incoming tweets become tickets. Here are several scenarios for managing incoming tweets and converting them to tickets.

• Favorites. Convert tweets outside of Zendesk by favoriting them in your Twitter client. This approach allows you to manually choose tweets to convert before they ever reach your Zendesk.
• Mentions and direct messages. Automatically create tickets from public tweets that contain your Twitter account's handle or direct messages from Twitter users that you follow. You may end up with tickets that are not actually support requests and that need no follow-up but you can manage these out of your ticket queue by manually solving and closing or deleting them.
• Triggers. Use one or more triggers to monitor new support requests that originate from your Twitter channel. You can use the trigger condition Ticket Channel, which has the following three Twitter sources: Twitter, Twitter DM (direct message), and Twitter Favorite. The advantage to this approach is that you have much more control over the creation and management of Twitter-based tickets. See Managing twickets with business rules below.
• Zendesk Classic: Saved searches. Create Twitter searches in Zendesk and monitor your incoming tweets from within the Zendesk administrator interface. The advantage to this approach, aside from not having to manage them in another application, is that you can create as many saved searches as you need to monitor the Twitter traffic for your products and services. In other words, you sort through your Twitter stream and just grab the ones containing relevant keywords. You can then manually convert one or more tweets to tickets, retweet messages, and also view the Twitter user's profile.

Which approach you take might be based on your overall Twitter traffic or the number of administrators who are available to monitor and convert tweets, or the number of agents you have available to deal with support requests. You may want to use a combination of all of these approaches.

Adding Twitter accounts to your Twitter channel

To start, you need to add at least one Twitter account to your Twitter channel. You can add as many Twitter accounts as you need. For example, your company may have different Twitter handles for different aspects of the company (sales, support, operations, and so on). One of your accounts can be set as the primary, which means that all tweet responses from your Zendesk use the primary account's Twitter handle.

You can also watch this short video.

Setting Up the Twitter Channel (01:20)

To add a Twitter account

1. Click the Admin icon (), then select Channels > Twitter.
   Zendesk Classic: Select Settings > Channels > Twitter > Edit.
2. Select the Twitter accounts tab.
3. Click Add Twitter account.
4. You'll be prompted to log in to Twitter and then authorize Zendesk to use your account. Enter your login information and then click Authorize App.

After your account has been authorized, your newly added Twitter account will be listed on the Twitter accounts tab. You'll want to edit the account's settings to control how tweets to this account are handled.

Editing Twitter account settings

After you've added a Twitter account, you should configure some basic settings for the account. These are described in the following table.

To edit a Twitter account, from the Twitter accounts tab, click the Edit link next to the account.

Setting	Description
Allow replies via this account	This setting allows agents to use this Twitter account when replying to a Twitter ticket. Agents can select the account below the reply box on a Twitter ticket:
Set as primary	If a Twitter account is marked as primary, all tweets from Zendesk will come from the primary Twitter account. You can change the primary Twitter account any of the other Twitter accounts you've added. You can set the primary account by editing this setting on this page or you can switch the primary account on the Twitter accounts tab. Roll your mouse over the list of Twitter accounts and you'll see Remove as primary link, if the account is currently the primary, or the Make primary link if the account is not already the primary.
Capture public mentions as tickets	This automatically converts any public tweet containing your Twitter account handle (for example, @mondocam) to a ticket.
Capture incoming direct messages as tickets	This automatically converts incoming direct messages into tickets. This allows your customers to contact you privately rather than publicly. You can only receive a direct message from a Twitter user that you follow.
Track favorites	This automatically converts a tweet that you mark as a favorite to a ticket. For example, if you're managing your Twitter stream using twitter.com, you have the option of manually marking a tweet as a favorite. Learn more about favoriting tweets in Twitter help.

Edit the Twitter account settings as needed, then click Update Twitter account.

Deleting a Twitter account

From the Edit page you can also delete the Twitter account from your Zendesk. Deleting an account does not remove any of the tickets that were created via the Twitter account.

Automatically converting tweets to tickets

As shown in the table above, you can choose to automatically convert public mentions and direct messages into tickets (Capture public mentions as tickets and Capture incoming direct messages as tickets). If you enable these, the option to manually convert tweets to tickets will no longer be available for that Twitter account.

Viewing your twickets

As described in Creating and managing saved searches below, you can create keyword searches to monitor your Twitter stream from within Zendesk. Your saved searches are available on the Manage searches tab in the Twitter channel settings page. When you convert a tweet to a ticket, it is added to your ticket queue and you can create a view just for your twickets if you'd like. See Managing twickets with business rules below.

Adding Twitter search to the top menu bar (Zendesk Classic only)

In the Classic version of Zendesk, you can add your saved Twitter searches (defined in Creating and managing saved searches) to a quickly accessible menu in the top menu bar.

To enable Twitter search in the menu bar in Zendesk Classic

1. Select Settings > Channels > Twitter > Edit.
2. Select the General settings tab.
3. Enable the menu by clicking Yes next to the Enable twitter search? option.

Appending ticket links to outgoing tweets

Another option for your outgoing Tweets is to append a shortened URL to the ticket you created from the tweet. This allows the Twitter user to access the ticket page in the Web portal via their Twitter account. In other words, remote authentication is used to log in through Twitter to Zendesk (end-users must sign in to Zendesk to see the ticket page).

Once a Twitter user has access to the ticket page, they can add a longer comment than they could have in Twitter given the 140 character limit of a tweet. They can also update their user profile (adding their email address for example).

Note: If you started using Zendesk on or after August 21, 2013, this option is not available until you activate your Help Center. See Getting started with the Help Center.

You have the option of allowing the agent to decide if a shortened or the original URL is used in the response. And, you can choose one of several URL shortening services to use.

To append ticket links to outgoing tweets

1. Click the Admin icon (), then select Channels > Twitter.
   Zendesk Classic: Select Settings > Channels > Twitter > Edit.
2. Select the General settings tab.
3. Enable the ticket links by clicking Yes next to the Append ticket links to outgoing tweets? option.
4. If you want agents to decide when to use shortened URLs, deselect the Always include shortened ticket URL option. It is selected by default.
5. If you want to change the URL shortening service, choose from the options listed or select Custom and then enter the URL of the shortening service you want to use.
6. Click Save tab.

Creating and managing saved searches

As discussed in How tweets become tickets, there are several ways to approach viewing and managing incoming tweets. You can manage them manually both within and outside your Zendesk account or you can automate the process of turning tweets into tickets.

An effective way of managing incoming tweets is to create Twitter searches based on specific keywords. For example, you can create a Twitter search that captures any tweets that mention one of your products by name. You can create a Twitter search and set the criteria in Zendesk and then view the search results and manually determine which tweets should be converted to tickets.

If you're using multiple Twitter accounts in your Twitter channel, you can select which one to respond from in the search. This only works if you haven't set one of our your Twitter accounts as the primary account.

Searches can also be made available to all agents, just agents in a specific group, or only yourself.

For more information about using your saved Twitter searches, see Using your Twitter saved searches to monitor and manage tweets.

You can also watch this short video.

Managing Twitter Searches (01:02)

To create a Twitter search

1. Click the Admin icon (), then select Channels > Twitter.
   Zendesk Classic: Select Settings > Channels > Twitter > Edit.
2. Select the Manage searches tab.
3. To create a new search, click Add search.
4. Set the options described in the following table.

   Setting	Description
   Name your search	The title of your saved search.
   Respond to tweets as	The default Twitter account for responding to tweets in this search. If you set one of your Twitter accounts as the primary, your response will come from that primary account. This search-based response setting will only be used if none of your Twitter accounts are set as the primary. If you're monitoring different Twitter streams, you may not want to set a primary and just respond from each Twitter account separately.
   Keywords	Zendesk will search Twitter for tweets that match these keywords. Click Preview Twitter Search to test your keywords. You use the Twitter keyword search syntax to define a search. See Twitter search operators.
   Search available for	Set the availability of the search. You can make it available to all agents, just agents in a specific group, or only yourself.

5. Click Add search.

To edit a saved search

1. Click the Admin icon (), then select Channels > Twitter.
   Zendesk Classic: Select Settings > Channels > Twitter > Edit.
2. Select the Manage searches tab.
3. Next to the search you want to edit click Edit.
4. Make your changes and then click Update search.

To delete a saved search

1. Click the Admin icon (), then select Channels > Twitter.
   Zendesk Classic: Select Settings > Channels > Twitter > Edit.
2. Select the Manage searches tab.
3. Next to the search you want to delete click Edit.
4. Click Delete. You'll be prompted to confirm that you want to delete the search. Click OK.

Filtering out retweets

You may also want to filter out retweets from your Twitter search results. To do this, add "-filter:retweets" to your search string. This excludes all retweets from your search results.

Managing twickets with business rules

A number of conditions are available to manage your twickets using business rules.

Like the other Zendesk channels, you can detect a ticket's source using the Ticket Channel condition in automations, reports, triggers, and views. There are three Twitter source types you can use in the Ticket Channel condition: Twitter, Twitter DM (direct message), and Twitter Favorite.

If, for example, you wanted to create separate views of each of the Twitter source types, you simply choose the Ticket Channel condition and then select the type.

In addition to the Twitter channel source types, you also have three other Twitter conditions that are available in triggers:

• Requester's Twitter followers are...
• Requester's number of tweets is...
• Requester is verified by Twitter

The first two conditions help you to determine how active and potentially influential a Twitter user is, which may influence how you manage their tweets. For example, you might want to set twickets from more highly visible Twitter users to Urgent so that you respond as quickly as possible. Here's an example of what a trigger like that might look like:

The Requester is verified by Twitter condition is a special type of Twitter account that has had its identity verified by Twitter (by submitting proof of business, for example). Knowing that a Twitter account has been verified may be important to you in determining how to handle twickets. For more information, see FAQs about Verified Accounts in Twitter help.

And of course, you can also adds tags to your twickets and use them to manage your twickets through your workflow.

Understanding why your Twitter channel might be deauthorized

Zendesk constantly monitors your Twitter accounts for new public mentions and direct messages. If Zendesk cannot connect with your Twitter account, it will send an email notification to all admins on your account .

If you receive notification that your Twitter channel has become deauthorized, you need to reauthorize the affected Twitter account in your Zendesk. To do so, click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Channels > Twitter.

Common reasons your Twitter channel might become deauthorized include:

• The password on your Twitter account has changed.
• The Twitter account no longer permits Zendesk to view its timeline and tweet on its behalf.

  This can happen if the Zendesk Twitter app has been removed from your Twitter account’s list of allowed apps.

• Zendesk receives a consistent response from Twitter indicating that we are not authorized to access your Twitter account’s content.

  This should only happen due to an error in Twitter’s platform.