GetSocial Product Updates — April 2015
Hello everyone. April has been great, and I mean GREAT. We’re experiencing some serious growth (61% since the beginning of the month to be precise) and we’re now onboarding hundreds of new accounts every day. An uncle once told that with great power comes great responsibility but I’d add that it also comes great feedback.
Besides handling some support tickets everyday, we also have the opportunity to review a ton of feedback/feature requests. That pretty much guides us on how & why people are using the product and what they want & need in the future.
With that in mind, this first weeks of April were, product-wise, focused on improving existing features, experience and drive more value to eCommerce users, which are becoming quite relevant in the GetSocial community. That said, I’m going to organize today’s product update in three categories:
- New Features
- Feature Improvements
- Experience Improvements (Web & Wordpress)
New Features
As above-mentioned, eCommerce websites are starting to become a relevant presence in our user base. In fact, most of the product feedback we’re getting in the last weeks has to do with integration with platforms such as WooCommerce & Magento. Nuno and the product team tried to understand how we could address their concerns with both improvements to the existing product and new features, very eCommerce specific. This is what we came up with.
We’ve made it very easy and seamless for WooCommerce users to install their social sharing buttons & other apps on their online stores. All apps are closely integrated with product pages & posts. Now it’s easy to track social media ROI for WooCommerce websites, from awareness to conversion.
Talking to eCommerce customers is insightful and yet, repetitive (in the good sense). Their demand points are so straight to the point: more traffic, more sales. One of the biggest challenges in eCommerce is fighting cart abandonment. The visitor goes to the website, browses the online shop, adds some products to her cart but then, void. Somehow the visitor leaves the website never to return again. We tried to think of something to get those engaged visitors back and advertisement was not an option . As you know, GetSocial is a social media app store not an advertising company. Online customers are quite price sensitive, so we wanted to give them a reason to (1) share their email address and (2) get them notified about a price change on a specific product. So without further ado, introducing Price Alert.
We love this feature. Price alert allows a visitor to subscribe to price changes on a specific product, through their email. Whenever a price changes, the visitor receives an email with that information and a link back to the product. It’s dead simple but a great (qualified) traffic generator to eCommerce websites. It is also a great way to feed retargeting campaigns you’re already doing. Price Alert integrates automatically with WooCommerce, Magento & Shopify.
Features Improvement
Following user feedback, we’ve also made two adjustment to existing features. We’re based in Lisbon, Portugal & London, UK and sometimes we tend to forget some other parts of the world. You might not know this but 25% of our users are from Russia & South-east Asia. However, we weren’t providing more than 1–2 specific sharing buttons for their networks and people were leaving us. We’ve changed that now and also added some more networks.
We were quite themed and specific in this network update. We’ve added the following networks:
Hacker News: For our users’ tech-savvy visitors.
VK: Along with Odnoklassniki, Russia’s two largest network are now available.
Facebook Messenger: Our strategy to make content chat-sharable (along with Whatsapp) is now complete.
Buffer: To make it easy for our users’ visitors to schedule their favorite content.
RenRen, Baidu & Weibo: For our Chinese friends.
Many of our customers have their websites with a stylish flat design look. And sometimes our existing buttons just looked .. misplaced. We developed a quick toggle option that allows you to activate flat design in your sharing features (even mobile). A good example is in the top and bottom of this post. Yep, GetSocial buttons.
GetSocial Experience Improvements
We hadn’t changed the looks of our app store since we made it code free. That wasn’t particularly a problem but recently, after looking at our feature usage, we understood we could make your life easier. Today, our users have access to 12 apps and consuming that information was becoming difficult. Introducing the new app store. Filter your apps by paid apps, code free apps or by app category (sharing, tracking, engagement, eCommerce).
Most of our users use our Wordpress Plugin and we’ve been receiving tons of feedback on how to improve its experience. By far the most requested feature was the ability to select where our apps show and where they don’t. To help, we’ve developed a toggle feature.You can configure it on the plugin settings (to set a default) or individually, on each page or post.
And that’s all for this update. We hope that we’re doing a good job in helping you drive more traffic and conversions to your website. We’re always open to more feedback as it helps us feed our product pipeline. What do you think is missing in GetSocial’s product?
Comment below to share your thoughts.