Redesigned Articles

From day one Hail has empowered you to easily create great looking articles and get them out to your audience in a timely manner through social media and blogs. From today those articles have a new design that takes full use of the branding options in Hail and provides a much more attractive and mobile-friendly layout, along with new features such as location maps and signups to mailing lists.

Click here for an example of the new design and be sure to check out your own articles, which are also shiny and new.

Image & Video Sharing

Articles, with their rich-media galleries and attachments, make for great reading, however you've told us that there's times you just want to post that one great photo or video. Little Jimmy has just nailed the winning shot and you've got the perfect pic on your phone. You quickly make it available to the team in Hail, add a caption with optional description and location, and publish it out to social media and blogs, all from the sidelines.

Check out this image example and our own Hailey's video teaser.

Email Updates & Notifications

Up to now all those great articles created in Hail had to be added to a Newsletter or Magazine before they could be published in an email template to a list of subscribers. Now all you MailChimp users can publish your articles and even individual images and videos by email also. This is great for spreading the word about important stories that you want delivered straight to subscribers' inboxes.

So now a business with an upcoming seminar can not only post it to social media, but also email out the article, including a location map to where the event will take place. And in the case of a snow day, a school could upload a photo or take a quick snap, post it to Facebook and seamlessly email it out to all the parents and caregivers with an informative caption.

Check out our Snow day example ☺︎

Email Signups

Some of you keen-eyed readers out there may have noticed the email subscription blocks in the Hail examples above. This feature is a new option when adding a MailChimp connection and allows readers to subscribe themelves to your MailChimp lists.

So if you want there to be a "Sign up to our updates” in all published outputs and on your Hail Homepage, then you simply need to remove the current MailChimp list connection(s) and add them again in Hail. That’s also a good opportunity to rename the list(s) in MailChimp to something that people will be happy to sign up to, eg. 'ACME's News & Updates' or 'School News & Notifications'.

One More Thing™

Lastly, it's what all you content creating business leaders have been asking for — LinkedIn integration!

Rounding out Hail's social media connections we now offer seamless publishing to LinkedIn. So while you're posting your latest newsletter, article, image or video to Facebook and Twitter you can also share it to your own LinkedIn profile and/or a company's page. All you have to do is authorise Hail once in the Connections section and it'll be added as a publishing option for all your content.

Whew! This was a big release in many ways. Thanks so much for being a Hail user, we hope you have fun exploring all these new features in Hail and be sure to get in contact if you have any feedback or questions.

Tom for Team Hail