When building an online community, social features are an essential part of the mix. They can help establish a loyal membership, help you to advertise via free media outlets (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and help your users connect in meaningful ways. One of the reasons we’re SocialEngine is that we give you these tools to help you put the Social in your community. Here’s how we do that and why we’re the best choice to make your online community successful.
Activity Feed (wall)
This is the hub of your community. It’s where the action takes place and what grabs your member’s attention right when they log into your site. Within minutes, your members can see what their friends have been up to, find interesting content that’s recently been shared on the site, and even share what they’ve been up to. SocialEngine allows you full control over the Activity Feed which can be crucial to your user’s satisfaction.
Multi-Channel Publishing
SocialEngine offers Facebook, Twitter, and Janrain Integration that provides publishing option to multiple social websites right from the wall. This is great for your site as it allows your users to post to their Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites that Janrain offers. With users publishing to various social media sites, you get some great, free exposure for your site. You can’t beat free advertising! This also helps keep people on your site longer as they can post right to their various social sites without leaving your community. Giving your members easy tools to use is a key to user retention.
Networks
Here’s a very cool feature that can make a huge difference in your community. Networks allows you the ability to have specialized networks of users all grouped together by their interests or location or however you decide to set up the networks. You can even set it to automatically put a user in a network when they sign up based on profile details they fill in. Users in a network will only see the wall content shared by other users in the same network and interact with other users in their network. Ads can also be set just to show to users in a specific network for better ad targeting.
Groups and Events Walls
Each Group or Event has its very own wall (activity feed). With this awesome feature users in a Group or users that are following an Event will see the activity just for that Group or Event. This is a great way to keep them engaged as they can easily see what’s happening just for this specific area. SocialEngine gives you control over Events and Groups for better website management.
Chat module
People love to talk. It’s a natural thing online these days to have a Chat system. SocialEngine gives you a great Chat feature that allows you to control how it works and create various chat rooms.
Building conversations
The SocialEngine system is very flexible and allows you to really get your users interacting on content in areas of the site that you prefer them to post in. They can comment on the feed activity in addition to commenting where you place the comment widget. This is a great way to give you more control over your site. It’s also a perfect way to engage your users and get the conversations going.
With all of the above tools, plus the many more in SocialEngine, you’ll be well on your way to building and establishing a successful online community. Stay tuned for more articles that will help you build the website of your dreams with SocialEngine!
Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.~ Henry Ford
