Introduction
Welcome to Social Squared! Social Squared is a discussion board tool that provides a structure around conversations and questions that may arise within your department or perhaps in a team working together on a project.
Your SharePoint Site Owner or Team Owner will have provided a structure around your conversations using Forum Groups and Forums. A Forum Group is the outer category for forums, as seen in the image below. Topics, which can be conversation starters or questions related to the forum can be posted for others to read and respond to.
The image below shows an example of Social Squared within an “Employee Wellbeing” site. Employee wellbeing is a broad subject, so the conversations have been grouped into Forum Groups such as Worklife balance, Health & Safety, and Employee Growth & Development. The subcategories are the forums wherein you can ask questions related to wellbeing, such as a question about working hours. Subject matter experts or other members of your SharePoint site can respond to your Topic.
These conversations can be searched or discovered easily in the future due to the structure of Social Squared. For example, a new employee in your organization may benefit from discovering the answer to a question that was asked many months ago. If the question was asked in a private email, or within a Teams Posts tab, it would be very difficult to find the question or the answer in months to come.
Throughout the Getting Started guide, we will explore each of the features of Social Squared from an end user perspective. If you wish to read about configuring Forum Groups, Forums, and other administrative settings, please visit our help centre.
In the next section, we will discover more about navigating Social Squared.
Navigating Social Squared
There are many different views within Social Squared that can be used to display the content in different ways. In this section, we will explore the three main views which are:
- Forum Group
- Forum
- Topic
The Forum Group View is the initial view that you will see when navigating to a page containing Social Squared.
Forum Group View
The Forum Group View displays the Forum Groups specific to the SharePoint Site or Team that you are in. Each Forum Group is depicted by the blue bar shown in the below image. The Forum Groups can be expanded and collapsed by clicking them on the right-hand side of the bar. Collapsing a Forum Group helps you to focus on a specific forum group. It is also possible that your Site Owner or Team Owner has masked one or more of the Forum Groups from the SharePoint page or Teams Channel that you are currently on. Masking a forum group in the settings helps to display content that is more relevant to the current page or channel.
From the Forum Group View, you can access the menu in order to select other views such as Recent Posts, My Posts, Recent Activity etc. We will discuss the other views in more depth in the ‘Other Useful Views’ section.
The Search bar allows you to perform a search which will span all forum groups and forums, which helps you to find the content that you are looking for.
Forum View
When you enter a forum by clicking the forum title from the Forum Group view, you will see the topics within the forum. Each Topic may contain symbols representing if the topic has been answered or contains a featured post, along with other information such as the average ratings for the Topic.
From the Forum view, you can read each topic, or create your own. To create your own, you can click ‘Add New Topic’. In a later section, we will discuss in more detail how you can create a new topic.
At the bottom of the Forum view, you will see pagination controls allowing you to see more topics within the forum than those that are currently displayed.
Using the Subscribe/Unsubscribe button, you can ensure that you receive notifications either through email or Teams notifications should a new topic be created within this forum.
In the next section, we will discuss how to navigate the Topic view.
Topic View
Once you have navigated into a topic, you will be able to reply to the main topic, or to the other replies.
Initially, the Topic and the replies to a topic will appear in a flat chronological view. You can click the Threaded View button if you wish to see the structure of the conversation. Each reply to the main topic will be indented. A reply to a reply will be indented twice, and so on.
If the topic contains many replies, and you wish to see if there is a reply that is marked as the answer or as featured, you can click the Show Answered or Show Featured buttons.
As well as subscribing to an entire forum, within the Topic View you can subscribe to that single topic. This is useful if no one has yet replied with an answer to a question, but you are also curious to know what the answer to the question is when it arrives.
You can sort the thread in several ways. The sorting options include by:
- Chronological
- Author
- Votes
- Likes
- Answered
- Featured
Feedback to posts can be given using Voting, Likes, and Emojis. The Voting and Like features are optional, so you may not see them within your forums.
If you wish to reply to the post, you can perform a straightforward reply, or use the “Reply with quote” feature. Reply with Quote will embed the post that you are replying to within your post.
Badges are also awarded for contributions to the forums. You’ll receive one point for replying to forum threads, and 3 points for having your reply marked as an answer. Additionally, if a post that you created is upvoted, you will receive 2 points. If it is downvoted, 2 points will be deducted. (Your SharePoint Site Owner/Administrator can disable downvoting.) Those point levels are converted to badges next to your signature allowing you to demonstrate your contributions to the forum to gain credibility.
Creating a Topic
Add a new topic
To Add a new Topic, first navigate to the most relevant forum to the topic that you are creating. Then, click the Add new Topic button. 
On the Topic creation page, you must provide a subject and a body for your topic. The Rich Text toolbar helps you to format and style your topic, add images, video links, and more.
You can also Tag your post which will help people find your topic using the Tag Cloud. The tags are very similar to that of a hash tag within Twitter or LinkedIn.
Rich Text Toolbar
The Rich Text Toolbar options are described from left to right below:
- Styling for Headers/Paragraph
- Font selection
- Font size
- Font Colour
- Font Background Colour
- Source – toggle between visual editor and an HTML editor.
- Insert code in a block for discussion such as HTML, JavaScript, Python.
- Bold
- Italic
- Underline
- Text Alignment
- Strikethrough
- Hyperlink
- Bullet Point List
- Numbered List
- Insert Table
- Insert link to video URL such as YouTube video link.
- Insert/Upload Image (Note that an image can also be copy/pasted)
- Block Quote – Useful for inserting a comment
- Undo
- Redo
- Insert Image via URL
- Insert Emoji
Tags
After composing your Topic, you can tag it so that users can find your post more easily through search and the tag cloud view in Social Squared. To help with tag consistency, Social Squared will suggest tags to you that have already been used for similar content within the Forums. You can select these suggestions to use them as a tag against your post, or you can type your own tag. When typing your own tag, other suggestions may appear based on what you typed. Press Enter after typing a tag, and then you can add another tag.
When you have finished composing your message, can click Add to add the new topic. In the next section, we will explore replying to topics.
Note: When you create a new topic with a new subject, Social Squared may offer existing topics that are a potential match for the topic that you are about to create. To save duplicating a question, it may be worth reading those topics to see if they are similar in content to what you were about to post. This could save you some time, and you may find the answer to your question without creating a new topic.
Replying to a Topic
When you wish to reply to an existing topic, you can simply click the Reply button below the main topic post or below someone else’s reply. You can create a straightforward reply, or reply with a quote that will embed the message that you are responding to within your reply.
When replying, you will also be able to use the Rich Text formatting, tag your reply, and attach files.
Note: To Reply with Quote, click the ellipsis next to the Reply button and select ‘Reply with Quote’.
If you don’t see a Reply button, it is possible that the Topic has been locked. Locking a topic is performed by the Moderator or Administrator of your SharePoint Site/Forum.
Attaching Files
Files can be attached to a New Topic, or to a Reply to a Topic. You can attach a file by clicking the ‘Attach Files’ button at the bottom of the post. Your administrator may have refined the types of files that can be attached, and they may have set a file size limit. To add the file attachment:
Drag the file into the ‘Drop files here’ section. Or:
Click the ‘Drop files here’ section and browse to the file that you wish to attach.
Tagging Content
Tagging your post with descriptive tags makes it easier for other people to find your posts. In some respects, it is very similar to using hashtags on Twitter or LinkedIn. Your post will contain a subject and a body. The content inside the subject and the body is searchable from within Social Squared, but using Tags to further describe your post means that terms that don’t actually appear in your post itself could still be used as a means to make it searchable. The tags will also display in the tag cloud view of Social Squared which is a great way to navigate to posts of a similar nature.
Take for example the below post about a Dying Orchid. The word “Indoor Plant” doesn’t appear in the subject or the body of the post. Including ‘Indoor Plants’ as a tag would mean that the post would be returned as a result should someone search ‘Indoor Plant’ or navigate to the ‘Indoor Plants’ tag.
Some tags may be suggested to you. The suggestions are tags that were used by other people in their posts when their posts contained similar content to yours. To accept a suggestion, simply click the tag.
Social Squared can be configured to use a Managed Set of terms by your organization. In that case, when choosing a tag, you would choose the closest match to describe the content of your post.
Moderation
Your Social Squared administrator may have enabled the Moderation feature on one or more forums, and there are a few moderation refinements to be aware of that may have been configured within each forum.
If moderation is not turned on for a forum, your new post will appear immediately for all users. If moderation is switched on, and a moderator needs to approve your Topic/Post before it appears to others, then your post will only appear after it has been approved. The moderator(s) will have been notified that you have created a new post and, they will be able to approve it.
You can track the status of your posts that are pending moderation by navigating to the My Posts view, and selecting the different views as shown below:
Subscriptions
Within Social Squared, you can subscribe to a Topic or to an entire forum.
Subscribing to a Topic means that you will be notified when someone replies to that Topic. This is especially useful when you are interested in the outcome of a question or conversation.
To Subscribe to a Topic:
Open the topic that you are interested in.
Click Subscribe on the command bar as shown below: 
You can also subscribe to an entire forum. This is useful when you are contributing answers to other people's questions and would like to be notified of New Topics rather than replies to a topic. To subscribe at the Forum level:
Navigate to the Forum that you are interested in.
Click the Subscribe button on the command bar as shown below: 
Note that the Subscribe button is a toggle; after clicking it once, it changes to say Unsubscribe, and that’s how you can Unsubscribe from a Topic or Forum.
Following Users
As well as subscribing to a Topic or a Forum, you can follow a specific person. It may be that the person that you wish to follow is someone in authority such as a teacher, or just someone that you consider to be interesting based on the content that they have created.
When you follow a person, you will receive an email notification when that person creates a post. To follow another person:
Click the hyperlink for a person’s name wherever you may see it in Social Squared. The name is shown in the Forum Group view against their latest post, within the Forum view, and also in the Topics view. You can also search for another person's content which we will explore later.
In the User Side panel that opens, click the link to follow or unfollow the user as highlighted in the image below.
Followers View
You can manage the people that you are following by opening the Followers view. To open the Followers view, click the ellipsis in the top left corner of Social Squared and select the Followers view.
You can then see who is following you, and the people that you are following. If you wish to unfollow someone, click the hyperlink for their name and then click Unfollow Username.
Search User's Posts
Further to the previous section on following people, it is also possible to search on a specific user's posts. This is something that you may decide to do prior to following them, or simply because you are gleaning some insights or knowledge from the person who may be a subject matter expert. To search for a specific user's posts:
Click the top left hand ellipsis.
Choose Users Posts
Enter the username for the person that you wish to search for and click View.
The view will show the posts that the person has made. Clicking View Topic will open the entire topic containing the post.
Useful Views
As well as the Forum Group view, and the Forums view that show your discussions organized by Forums and Forum Groups, it is sometimes useful to view forum content in some other ways:
Favorites
The Favorites View will display all topics that you (the current user) have marked as a favorite Topic. You can mark a Topic as Favorite by clicking the Mark as Favorite star icon in the top right-hand corner of the Topic as shown below: 
Marking a Topic as Favorite is a great way to bookmark a topic that you want to come back to at a later date.
Popular Topics
Topics that receive the most views are displayed in the Popular Topics view. The SharePoint Site Owner/Administrator can set how many Popular Topics to display (the default is 5). The Topics that are shown in the popular topics view will be from across all forums and forum groups within the SharePoint site that are visible.
Recent Activities
The Recent Activities view will display Topics that have received recent activity. The SharePoint Site Owner/Administrator can define the number of days that are considered to be recent within the perspective of your organization or site. The default value is 7 days. The posts that are displayed will be from across all forums and forum groups within the current SharePoint site that are visible.
Active Users
The Active Users view will show you a list of the most active users and the count of how many posts those users have created. The SharePoint Site Owner/Administrator can set the threshold for the number of days that is considered active – for example, most active in the last 7 days, or 30 days.
Users Posts
Using the Users Posts view, you can search on a specific user to see the posts that they have created. The posts will be displayed from across all forums and forum groups. You can then view the entire topic by clicking the View Topic link next to one of the posts.
My Posts
The My Posts view will display all of the posts that you have created, including the posts that are pending moderation, or rejected by a moderator. You can filter the view based on the topic’s status: Posted, Pending, or Deleted/Rejected.
Unanswered Topics
The Unanswered Topics view is useful for a community member or moderator to see all of the Topics that don’t have a post Marked as Answered. The Topic may have been answered, but the Topic Author or Moderator has not marked it as such. The posts will span all Forums and Forum Groups, allowing a single list of unanswered topics to be displayed that are visible.
Tag Cloud
The Tag Cloud view will display all Tags from all Topics/Posts in all Forums and Forum Groups within the SharePoint site. The Tags are displayed in alphabetical order, and increase in font size based on the popularity of the tag.
Clicking on a tag from within the tag cloud will display all topics and posts that are marked with that tag.
Pin a View
Clicking Pin a View will mark the current selected view as your (current user) view. The view that you selected is recorded in a browser cookie. So if you were to use an alternative browser, or in-private window, the view may be different.
Share (this page) on Viva Engage
The Share (this page) on Viva Engage option will generate a link to the current page so that you can share it with a Yammer community. This is a great way to create more exposure to the Topics and Discussions occurring within Social Squared.
Providing Feedback
When you are reading Topics and Posts within Social Squared, it’s useful to provide feedback if not in a reply, then through ratings, likes, and votes. These three features (Ratings, Votes, and Likes) can be used as a way to show your acknowledgement or appreciation for the Topic or the Post.
Ratings
You can rate a Topic from 1 to 5 stars by clicking the number of stars based on your rating, 5 being Excellent.
The average rating from everyone who rated the Topic is displayed within the Forum View.
Voting
If this feature is enabled, you can vote up or vote down each post. This feature can be refined to only allow up votes, up and down votes, or no voting at all by the SharePoint Site Owner/Administrator.
Voting is useful for discussions around idea brainstorming, or voting on what the appropriate response to the topic may be.
Note: You cannot vote for your own reply to a topic.
Likes
Using Likes, you can provide feedback on individual posts using a variety of emojis. The feature can be refined to show only the Loveheart Emoji, or the feature can be turned off altogether by the SharePoint Site Owner/Administrator.
Sorting Posts
Within a Topic, you may see a lot of replies if it is a popular topic. You can sort the posts into various orders using the drop down sorting options in the top right corner of the Topic view:
Chronological (Default) – Sort in Ascending or Descending order based on the time the post was created.
Author – Sort in Ascending or Descending order by Author of the post.
Votes – Sort in Ascending or Descending order based on the number of votes each post has received.
Likes - Sort in Ascending or Descending order based on the number of likes each post has received.
Answered - Sort in Ascending or Descending order based the posts that are marked as Answered.
Featured - Sort in Ascending or Descending order based the posts that are marked as Featured.
Badges
Badges are automatically awarded for your contributions within the forum, and work on a points system. If you create a reply to a topic, or have your post marked as an answer or upvoted, you will be awarded points. Your SharePoint Site Owner/Administrator can define the thresholds for each awarded badge. For example, 5 points may be the requirement for your first badge, 10 points for your second badge, and so on. The Badge icon may also be defined by your SharePoint Site Owner/Administrator. The below example shows Demo User6 as having been awarded two badges.
For gamification purposes, some of these other badge icons may be more relevant to your organization.
Searching Social Squared
Social Squared has its own in-built search feature that enables you to search for keywords or phrases across all forums within the SharePoint site.
In the top right-hand corner of the Forum Group view, you can enter your search term into the search box, and then hit Enter (Return).
The search results will display with your keyword or phrase highlighted. You can refine the results based on the date range of the post, and whether you wish the search to include the Title, Content, and/or Tags, and also whether to only search for Complete Words.
If you enter a phrase, each word in the phrase will be treated as an ‘Or’. For example, searching for Working Remotely will return posts with either Working or Remotely in the results. If you wish to ensure that the two words appear next to each other in a phrase, you can use the ‘+’ operator: for example, Working+Remotely.
The Complete Words checkbox can be deselected if you wish to search part of a word. For example, if you search for the word Work with ‘Complete Words’ deselected, you’ll see results that include ‘Working’, ‘Worked’, and ‘Worker’.
