Setting up the Twitter Channel

All Zendesk Suite and Zendesk Support customers can add at least one Twitter account so that public messages, such as public mentions, public replies to your Tweets, and public likes to Tweets, become tickets. Your agents will be able to see and respond to these tickets from the Support interface, just like any other ticket.

Additionally, Zendesk Suite customers can add multiple Twitter accounts and they can receive public messages and private messages (Twitter direct messages) from those accounts. You must be an administrator to add a Twitter account to Support.

This article includes these sections:

• How the Twitter channels works
• Adding Twitter accounts to Support
• Editing Twitter account settings
• Removing Twitter accounts from Support
• Appending ticket links to outgoing tweets
• Managing Twitter tickets with business rules
• Understanding why your Twitter account might be deauthorized

How the Twitter channels works

Zendesk Support monitors Twitter accounts and converts 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:

• Convert a tweet into a ticket and respond to the user with a tweet, or move the conversation to email
• Bulk convert multiple tweets into tickets in one step
• Convert tweets to tickets outside of Zendesk Support by liking 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
• Monitor and take action on Twitter activity using business rules

Only administrators have access to the incoming tweets. However, once they have been converted to tickets, all agents have access to Twitter tickets, unless you have restricted agent access to certain types of tickets.

Once a tweet becomes a ticket, it behaves just like any other ticket in Zendesk Support, except that you have the option of replying back to the Twitter user with a public tweet or moving the conversation to email.

You can control if and how incoming tweets become tickets. The approach you take might be based on your overall Twitter traffic or the number of agents you have available. Here are several scenarios for managing incoming tweets:

• Likes. Convert tweets outside of Zendesk Support by liking them in your Twitter client. This approach allows you to manually choose tweets to convert before they ever reach Zendesk Support.
• Mentions and direct messages. Automatically create tickets from public tweets that contain your Twitter account handle or from direct messages. Sometimes, tickets that are not support requests and that don't need follow-up are created. You can manage these out of your ticket queue by manually solving and closing or deleting them. Group direct messages are not supported and do not create tickets.
• 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 Like. The advantage to this approach is that you have much more control over the creation and management of Twitter-based tickets. See Managing Twitter tickets with business rules below.

Note the following limits:

• It can take up to 15 minutes for a ticket to be created from a tweet.
• Each Twitter ticket has a limit of 5,000 comments. After reaching the limit, Zendesk stops importing new tweets as comments on the ticket