Activity Feed API
Activity Feed: Meaning, Benefits & Examples!
Scrolling with Purpose: A Deep Dive into Social Feeds!
A whopping 4.9 billion people use social media applications across the world — poised to rise to 5.85 billion in 2027. Have you wondered what keeps the users glued to these applications? Some like to use them as communication tools, while some sections see them as content creation tools. But, it is the ease of “scrolling” factor, which keeps engaging the user base and acts as the ‘X’ factor in applications’ growth. This factor is the byproduct of a core functionality called Activity Feed — extensively seen in popular applications.
Isn’t the Activity feed called the News Feed? It is, but there is much more to it. Let’s find out!
What is an Activity Feed?
Activity feed, famously called News Feed, is a real-time chronological display of updates, events, or actions related to the network or activities. Activity feed serves different purposes in various applications. For instance, Activity feeds display a stream of updates, posts, likes, comments, and shares in Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. On the other hand, Activity feeds display information on recent purchases, product recommendations, reviews, and seller updates in Ecommerce applications like Amazon, eBay, etc.
“Embrace the scroll, for within the feed lies the narrative of an Application’s Journey!”
Types of Activity Feeds
Activity feeds come in various types, catering to different platforms, applications, and user preferences. Here are some common types of activity feeds:
1. Flat Feeds
A flat feed displays information — as they arrive — in the chronological order. Social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Instagram are prime examples of the effective implementers of flat feeds. Another day-to-day example is a soccer application, where you can see live updates of matches, as they arrive.
2. Aggregated Feeds
Aggregated feeds bundle a community’s activity into one action. For example, on Facebook or Instagram, if the like-minded (literally!) people react to one post, an aggregated feed may describe: X, Y, Z, and 105 others liked your post. Aggregated feeds might come handy for the wanna-be content creators to identify their relevant communities.
3. Notification Feeds
Notification feeds play a crucial role in keeping users informed about relevant and timely events, updates, or interactions within a platform or application. A common example of notification feeds are the changes made in collaboration tools like Google Docs or Sheets. In these platforms, the notification feed informs collaborators about changes made to shared documents.
4. Chronological Feeds
Chronological Feeds display updates in the reverse chronological order (from newest to the oldest). Chronological feeds provide users with a real-time view of the latest content. Popular examples of platforms implementing chronological feeds are Twitter (initially), Instagram (in its early days), and some sections of Facebook. Over the years, these platforms have embraced algorithmic feeds, where content is reordered based on various factors to enhance user engagement and satisfaction.
5. Custom Ranked Feeds
Custom-ranked feeds allow app developers to take complete control — they oversee the sorting of feeds. Imagine a scenario where a content/post is doing exceptionally well organically (i.e., the most likes, comments, and reshares) — developers ensure that content/post stays on top. Different applications implement different api feeds to rank a feed.
6. Personalized Feeds
Personalized feeds display content according to individual preferences, behaviors, and user interests. These feeds leverage algorithms, machine learning, and user data to curate and present content. Popular examples of personalized feeds include social media timelines, streaming service recommendations, news aggregators, and e-commerce product recommendations.
Importance of Activity Feeds in App Engagement
Social media users expect the platforms to present real-time data. These platforms rely on activity feeds to realize their expectations, thereby achieving metrics like user retention and app stickiness.
1. Promotes Interaction
Activity feeds bring a sense of involvement, build a community, and engage users with a stream of like-minded content. Imagine a user just logs into the X platform (previously Twitter), and he/she is presented with a stream of posts under the ‘For You’ tab. This tab features content from accounts you have chosen to follow on X along with recommended posts. This keeps the user constantly engaged — eradicates the FOMO (fear of Missing Out) factor and promotes interaction within the community.
2. Promulgates Fresh Content
Activity feeds continually populate fresh content about the latest developments, ensuring a sense of immediacy and relevance. Some activity feeds generate fresh content based on user interests, while some recommend content that the user ‘may’ like. Most social media platforms promote fresh content that its users may find interesting.
3. Helps in Decision Making
Activity feeds present app owners with real-time analytics, which helps in decision-making. Marketers make the most of the analytic data like shares and search queries, ensuring the content that best resonates with the audience. This real-time insight is crucial for making data-driven decisions, improving user experience, and optimizing content delivery.
4. Helps build User Habits
Statistics say: the average time spent on social media per day is 2 hours and 24 minutes. An average user wouldn’t want to come back to a boring social media platform, would they? Activity feeds encourage users to keep coming back to the platform, thereby making it a daily-use habit. One classic example is Push Notifications, which remind users of new content, messages, or activities. While writing this and watching Day 4 of India Vs England test match (simultaneously!),
I received a notification from Zomato as in the image below:
Strategies for Optimizing Activity Feeds
Optimizing activity feeds is crucial for enhancing user engagement, retention, and overall satisfaction. Implementing key features can help you get the most out of feed functionality.
1. You Gotta Experiment!
“Experiment is the sole judge of the validity of any idea!”
One of the first steps in optimizing activity feeds is to experiment with different ways. Here are some of the ways you can experiment:
- Order, as they arrive: A simple chronological feed will do the trick in most scenarios like live events, sensitive updates, etc.
- Most Popular, up the Top: Ordering popular feeds at the top, resonating the user interests, will promote a positive feel within the community.
- Algo, in the mix: Let the algorithm, for instance, like live activities api, do the ordering and optimizing activities.
2. Grouping
Grouping activity feeds is a strategy to organize and present related content in a more structured manner. This approach helps users navigate through the feed more efficiently.
- Roll, unroll with Threads: Bringing all of the related updates about an incident or happening in a series of threads saves time. Implement this in a way that it addresses an existing issue or pain point for users within your platform. Remember when Twitter (now X platform) introduced the Thread feature to promote long-form tweets?!
- Important People, up top: Not all social media personalities attract interests from users — only some of them attract consistent interests. Grouping updates from such personalities with the activity feeds might help the application in the long run.
3. Personalization
Almost 85% of businesses say they deliver a personalized experience to their customers, in this report from Demand Sage.
- The role of personalization in activity feeds is to deliver content based on user interests, thereby boosting user engagement. Promote Algorithmic personalization that increases adaptability according to the user’s past behavior.
- Moderation tools like topic filtering or user blocking enhance personalization by fostering a user-centric environment.
Classic Use Cases of Activity Feeds
Activity feeds are versatile components that find applications across various platforms and industries. Here are some activity feed examples and use cases:
1. Trip Advisor
TripAdvisor is a one-stop travel platform for planning and booking trips, exploring travel-related content, and accessing user-generated reviews and recommendations. Encompassing 490 million monthly active users, Trip Advisor is the second most viewed Travel Platform worldwide, as per this report.
In 2018, Trip Advisor came up with a new concept: world’s first travel feed. The Platform will not just host reviews, but also host content from major publishers. The platform did embrace the ‘personalized feed’ feature — where a user will see posts from like-minded travelers, influencers, or residents in specific destinations.
2. Venmo
Venmo is a mobile payment service that enables users to make peer-to-peer transactions quickly and easily. Venmo employs a feed-centric layout in three forms: the public feed, a friends feed, and private feed. With the ‘share your transaction’ features, the platform fosters a real sense of community. What Venmo did is the first of its kind — amidst the social politics of financial technologies (or famously FinTech).
The Future of Activity Feeds
Reading this, chances are that you might be an existing app owner or a wanna-be one, remember: activity feeds can transform your app into an interesting social channel. With a proper feed app, you can foster a user-centric social community to enhance the application’s growth. Build a customizable feeds API for your application, foster a community, and let the users engage.
“As technology continues to evolve, the user experience within activity feeds is likely to undergo transformative changes.”
