When you first configure your festival, one of the configuration tabs is for “Marketing” and includes fields for entering a variety of social media handles. We also ask for social media handles for your selections and venues.
None of this basic configuration is what we consider “social media integration”. We can't post to your accounts, follow users, read your DMs, or anything else. We simply promote your social media links in the footer of web pages, create links for people to share your site on social media, and link to the social media accounts of your selections and venues.
Social media integration is something deeper and requires further action on your part. If you leverage SparqFest integration features, the platform can selectively automate some of your work on social media platforms.
Why doesn't SparqFest integrate with all platforms?
You can connect your SparqFest site only with social media accounts that support programming interfaces for third-party tools to perform actions like following users. Unfortunately, most social media platforms have a very closed architecture and do not allow tools like SparqFest to integrate with them.
In fact, as of the writing of this document, only Mastodon is supported.
Connecting Accounts
As with other kinds of integration, social media integration is configured in “Account” > “Integrations”. Select the social media platform with which you wish to connect.
What happens next is specific to the requirements of the target social media platform. In the case of Mastodon, we need to know your Mastodon account so we can connect to the proper server. If you configured your festival Mastodon account under festival settings, the form will be pre-populated with that account name. Though you do not have to connect to that account, most festival should be connecting to that account.
Once you hit the “Connect” button, you will be sent to your Mastodon server to login. Once logged in (or if you were already logged in), the Mastodon server will ask you whether you wish to grant SparqFest access to your account. Authorize this access so Mastodon will let SparqFest work with your Mastodon account.
If the connection is successful, Mastodon will redirect you back to your SparqFest site. You can close that window.
When you return to your original Window, you will see your configuration options for that social media network.
Configuration Options
At this time, there is only one option: auto-follow selections. Enabling this option means that we will auto-follow any of your official selections when your selections enter their Mastodon account information.
We intend to add the following in the future:
- Posting scheduling information
- Scheduling nominee and winner announcements
- Featuring selections
By default, any feature we add will be turned off. We absolutely don't want to do anything with your social media accounts without you knowing about it.
In addition to changing your configuration options, you can come back to this screen to change your social media integration. If, for example, you change your Mastodon server, you can come back here and enter the new account. The process is exactly the same as connecting to the original account.