Activity Feeds (aka news feed) must be a part and parcel of your mobile app if you aim at increasing your user engagement and retention rates by creating a loyal in-app community of users. Integrating activity feeds is proven to have a great number of benefits and apps from across various categories have already implemented feeds into their mechanics. Our findings show that:
- 2.7X users are more likely to stay in-app for a sense of community and belonging;
- 7X social users have higher D30 retention;
- 11X social users generate more installs.
Activity feeds is a great way to personalize the user experience of your app and cater to the users’ specific needs and interests. Besides that, feeds are of great help in terms of getting first-hand feedback from your users which you can then apply to improve your app.
Integrating an activity feed into your app might be a rather challenging and time-consuming task, and instead of reinventing the wheel, we suggest that you consider the tools that are already available on the market and won’t take long to be integrated. Let’s have a look at two companies offering activity feeds as one of their features.
GetSocial
GetSocial’s Activity Feeds are part of an all-in-one solution of plug-and-play social features to acquire, engage, retain, and re-engage users. You can 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.
Besides, GetSocial is an all-in-one solution offering various features that can be of great value to your mobile app or game. For example, GetSocial helps you set up your referral marketing which is of paramount importance if you want to grow your network in an organic way. GetSocial automatically connects users with their invited friends making the process even more efficient. Moreover, you can re-engage your users with Push Notifications without turning to a third party for a solution and thus saving money and integration time.
Pricing is based on the daily active users of your mobile app.
Stream
Stream offers two products: activity feeds to increase user engagement and chat messaging. Their Feed API enables app creators to optimize app’s engagement and retention with the help of such advanced features as aggregation, ranking, real-time, and personalization.
Besides that, Stream created a versatile and comprehensive Feed UI Kit for Sketch that includes a social network UI kit, notification feed UI kit, music & video feed UI.
Pricing is based on feed updates.
Feature Comparison
| GetSocial | Stream | |
| Follow users and topics | y | y |
| Friend relationship | y | n |
| User groups | y | n |
| Feed ranking | n Only chronologically |
y |
| Aggregated feeds | n | y |
| Real-time | y | y |
| Personalization | y | y |
| Announcements | y | n |
| Richer content support (images, videos) | y | y |
| Support for localization, CTA buttons | y | n |
| Mentions/Hashtags/Reactions/Comments | y | y |
| Product tagging | y | n |
| Push notifications for reactions/comments/mentions | y | n |
| In-app notifications | y | y |
| Moderation | y | y |
| Content reporting by users | y | n |
| Automatic profanity filter | y | n Extra cost via third-party provider |
| Custom UI | y | y |
| App invites and Content sharing | y | n |
| Chat messaging | y | y |
| Install attribution & referral tracking | y | n |
| Deep linking | y | n |
| User segmentation & targeting | y | n |
| Mobile marketing automation | y | n |
Conclusion
Both Stream and GetSocial offer a great solution to create a communication channel in your app and build an engaged community of users. Stream’s functionality covers Activity Feeds and Chat Messaging, whereas GetSocial has a range of plug-and-play features that take into account each stage of a user’s lifecycle and help you boost user acquisition, engagement, and retention rates. This way you get all features you need wrapped up in one solution.
If you would like to learn more about how GetSocial can help you grow your mobile app, we are here to help!
