Module 3 : Messages
- Anona Gupta (Unlicensed)
Introduction to Messages
The CommunityConnect Labs platform lets you view, label, search and archive messages sent and received on your account. You can also track calls received on your channel. Click the “messages” icon at the top of the platform to navigate to this section.
Video Tutorial
Messages represent the incoming and outgoing interactions between your CommunityConnect account and your contacts on the platform.
All messages sent to and from the channel(s) connected to your CommunityConnect account are stored in the messages tab, where they are organized into preset folders displayed on the left side of the page.
Attach Media
Click the “Attachments” tab to attach media such as an image or video to your message.
Note the following:
Image attachments are limited to 500KB while video attachments are limited to 20MB.
Outgoing media is displayed in-app for Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WebChat and text messaging channels. For other channels, media is converted to a link.
Our text messaging provider, Twilio, only supports Multimedia Message Service (MMS) in the US and Canada. It will convert a picture message into a Short Message Service (SMS) with linked media when sending to MMS-incompatible numbers.
Twilio will also automatically resize the images you send to meet your contacts' carriers' requirements.
Advanced: Send to All Numbers Associated with Each Contact
Go to the “Advanced” tab and check the box “All Destinations” to send the message to each phone number for contacts who have multiple phone numbers attached to their profile.
SMS Character Limit
If a “Send Message” action exceeds 160 characters, it will automatically split and be sent as two separate messages. There is a character-counter beneath the dialogue box that shows the number of characters in your text / how many messages the text will be split into. In the example below, the message contains 155 characters and will send as 1 message.
Conversely, this message contains 194 characters and will be split into 2 messages.
Unicode
Certain complex characters will trigger your messages to be sent using Unicode encoding instead of the standard form of encoding known as GSM7. Messages that contain characters from the standard GSM7 alphabet will, by default, have a limit of 160 characters. However, if you use characters that are not included in the GSM7 alphabet, the message gets sent using Unicode encoding and has a limit of 70 characters.
Examples of characters that fall outside of the GSM7 alphabet are:
Letters with accents (e.g. é or î)
Curly quotes (“quotes”), which are automatically generated by many word processors. Curly quotes should be exchanged for straight quotes ("quotes").
Emojis, which should be entered as their text if possible rather than directly pasted in, i.e. :-) instead of 😊