Introduction to GetSocial Activity Feeds¶
Activity feeds enable you to increase user engagement and retention. Build user-powered social news feeds, and notifications into your mobile app in no time. Let users create engaging content and engage with others through comments and reactions. Users follow other users or topics and become members of various groups to get a personalized timeline of content.
Additionally, Activity feeds can be used for company to user communication. You can communicate with your users directly by posting important messages as announcements. Run in-app promotions and events, cross-promote your other apps, inform users about upcoming features, request feedback, and much more. You can target announcements to specific topics or post them everywhere. In addition to that, you can comment and react on users’ posts.
Features¶
- Introduction to GetSocial Activity Feeds
- Features
- Key advantages
- Topic feeds
- Group feeds
- User feeds
- Announcements
- Richer content
- Mentions and Hashtags
- Content reporting and moderation
- Custom UI
- Next steps
Key advantages¶
- In-app community: Create a community of users by letting them communicate with each other, share tactics, screenshots, brag about achievements and more.
- Community Management: Manage your in-app community by responding to your users, and posting announcements to promote in-app items, events, other portfolio apps, etc.
- Automatic Profanity Filter: Monitoring user-generated content 24/7 is an insurmountable task. It’s tough to keep up with user commentary at all hours of the day yourself, and hiring staff to focus just on that may not be cost-effective. Therefore, GetSocial’s activity feeds have an auto profanity filter that weeds out inappropriate content.
- Content Reporting and Moderation: Apart from automatic profanity filtering, any user-generated content within the app may be manually moderated through the Dashboard. Users can report spam or inappropriate content from within the app, developers get notified about this and can act accordingly: delete content, ban users for some time, etc.
To learn more read our blog post about the benefits of activity feeds.
Topic feeds¶
Also known as interest or categories, topics help categorize content in your app similar to Twitter or Quora. Topics have localized title and description for better discoverability, permissions that define how followers and other users can interact. Users can follow one or more topics to stay informed on conversations around the topics they follow.
Group feeds¶
Groups are created by users so that group members can communicate with each other around a shared interest. When users join a group they follow the group feed and content posted on the group feed is reflected on their timeline. Your users can now create their own groups and add or request other users to join it.
Users in groups can have different roles:
- Owner: owner of the group is the one who creates the group
- Admins: users could be assigned as admins of the group who can manage group members
- Members: users who are regular members of the group.
When users become members they also automatically follow the group’s feed. If a user wants to be a member of the group but not follow the group feed they can simply unfollow the group.
User feeds¶
Similar to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, etc users can follow other users in the app. When users post any content on their feed their post is reflected on their followers’ personalized timeline.
Announcements¶
Communicate with your users directly by posting important messages as announcements. Run in-app promotions and events, cross-promote your other apps, inform users about upcoming features, request feedback, and much more. You can target announcements to specific topics or post them everywhere. In addition to that, you can comment and react on users’ posts.
For convenience, announcements can also be scheduled for the future so for e.g. that you can create one for each day of the week and it will be shown automatically to your users. You can also update expired announcements to show them again.
Richer content¶
Activity posts support localization, multiple images, videos, hashtags, comments, reactions, and an action button. Posts also have custom properties so you can add custom metadata to each post like product ids, URLs, etc. to make the content more engaging and interactive.
Action buttons let users interact with your application. When users click on the button, you can redirect them to a page inside of your app or to an external URL or app store.
Each post can include multiple images and videos up to 10MB each.
Mentions and Hashtags¶
Activity Feed mentions allow a user to tag other people in posts/comments they generate. All mentions start with @ prefix. Check the full guide how to post mentions.
Tags in Activity Feed are a way to logically tag/refer specific content. As opposed to mentions, it’s not person-to-person reference, but rather marks the specific text. All tags start with # prefix. Check the full guide how to post tags.
You can add mentions and tags to the Activity Feed post from the Dashboard. To post a mention type @ + minimum 3 chars to see the user search result. To post a tag type # + minimum 2 chars to see the tags search result.
Activity feed posts can contain any number of mentions and tags; they are clickable and highlighted with blue. After the click on a tag, the current feed will be filtered and show only posts with such tag. The same can be done from the tags search field.
Content reporting and moderation¶
Both automatic content purification and manual content moderation is described in details here: Reporting and moderating Content.
Custom UI¶
Customizing UI is described in details here: Activity feed UI.
Next steps¶
- Learn how to add Activity Feed to your app in one line of code with prebuild UI.
- Understand how your users use Activity Feed with Analytics.