What Is An Activity Feed & How Does It Boost App Retention?

activity feed api

Besides learning what is an activity feed, explore its significance for online communities, and how it is known to boost app engagements and retention in the guide below.

While the start of the week stands as the morning blues for several people, the only dose of adrenaline for them would be to engage in a digital party – a social activity feed, where users can share, chat, and connect with others. 

Not only does an activity feed stand as an exceptional feature to add to any app, but makes the overall app magical with its presence. Such a big player is this attribute for app engagements and retention. 

So if you are one of those developers who want your apps to act as the center stage for engagements, virality, retention, and monetization, then this blog is right for you.

What is an activity feed?

An activity feed is a feature that displays a stream of real-time events, updates, or summaries to users, that can be added to any software application or the web. 

Here’s an example of an activity feed event:

Jeff shared a photo
Maria liked your article
Peter suggested a product

Developers mostly prefer to implement a social activity feed to their apps to elevate their app conversion rates. Plus, activity feeds keep users informed about any latest changes or happenings around.

Did you know? That every 1 in 2 apps is uninstalled the same month users downloaded. 

Now that you have seen what a feed is, let us focus on why you should use one for your project.

Why Does Your App Need An Activity Feed Embedded?

The prime benefit businesses use activity feeds is to sell more by bringing in new trends to their apps, and updates that audiences would love to see.

push notification for social feed

Other benefits include:

1. Activity Feeds Help To Collect User Feedback

In this scenario, a feed acts as a forum that allows users and agents to interact with each other and let businesses know where they can improve, what problems users face often, how well they are using the app, what are their expectations, and more.

With these insights on hand, bet you can build a market-valued product in a jiff.

2. Helps Personalize Content And Recommendations

The prime goal of launching an e-commerce app is to boost in-app purchases and to do it exceptionally well, you can use an activity feed. How?

  • Because one size does not fit all. Similarly, not all users use the app in the same way.
  • So the common in-app promotions may not work for all.
  • Here, you need to personalize promotional content to specific users based on their interactions with the app.
  • And recommend in-app purchases. To do this, the feed helps gather user behavior.

So, the better the app personalizations, the greater the conversions.

3. Makes Interactions Super Easy Within The App

Have you ever imagined how easily you can like your friend’s picture or an event happening in town with the presence of an activity feed?

  • Social activity feeds display a chronological order of streams and events that makes it easy for users to like, comment, or share the feeds at their comfort. 
  • Doing this, makes your users engaged with your app for quite a long time.
  • Eventually helping build communities.

4. Activity Feeds Improve Customer Support

  • True indeed that activity feed helps improve customer service because it alleviates the hardship of contacting users via calls or emails. 
  • Plus, users can contact your feed directly expressing their concerns without having to take to social media channels or any other place.
  • This way, you can stay in the race without hampering your identity.

5. Increase The Number Of App Signups

Increasing the number of app signups stands as one of the key performance indicators (KPI) for developers, as this number shows how successful their app is performing.

So what can you do to boost signups?

  • Give a compelling reason like adding an activity feed to your app.
  • The feed will show your user’s friends how engaging and interesting the app is.
  • And help them build a social community within the app making sharing of content seamlessly possible.
  • Plus, it helps build interactions and connections between users.
  • Thus adding value to your app.

6. You Get The Ability To Display Notification Badges

Notification badges are texts that appear on the app’s icon to alert users of any content update or activities that happened within the app.

Some of the most common examples of notification badges include:

  • In the case of emails, badges display the count of unread emails
  • In social media apps, badges are used to display the count of friend requests, mentions, and new posts.
  • In e-commerce apps, they are used for new product arrivals or discounts.

Now that you have seen how powerful badges can be. Some users do not like it to appear on their screens. Hence by opting for a customizable solution to build feeds, you can personalize features that your users would want.

But be sure to add a badge only if it adds value to your app as it may annoy users. Try adding a badge for a friend’s ratings, a sister’s recipe, or a post that gained rewards.

This info might make users glued to your app page. thereby enhancing user experience.

7. Bring In Users With A Push Notification

Now this is the trickiest part because most of them would confuse notification badges with push notifications. While both are different.

  • A push notification is an extended version of a badge,
  • And they are sent to users as a popup that may require higher action.
  • Or to simply notify users when their friends join the app.

Though activity-based push notifications can turn out to be an effective way to boost retention rates. It is highly crucial to maintain relevance, or else it may annoy users and make them delete apps.

Examples Of Activity-Based Notifications Include

  • Maria just commented on your post. Check it now
  • Your favorite creator has uploaded a new video. Check now
  • Your friend Sara just joined. Say Hi!

Thus, by using push notifications this way, developers can create interactive experiences in the activity feed. 

8. Activity Feeds Help Generate Revenues

While an engaging app is known to boost virality and retention, it is also known to spike up monetization levels altogether. Wow, how is it possible?

  • Well, with more users retaining, there arise opportunities for sales, ads, in-app purchases, and even subscriptions.
  • Now if you prefer to go ahead with ad-based monetization, your activity feed can help you earn money by boosting screen views.
  • These are called native ads and work much better than the banner ads. 

Hmm.. now these were some of the real benefits of how activity feeds enhance user engagements, interactions, and growth. 

Final Thoughts!

In short, having an activity feed for your app can enhance the retention rates to the peak, along with monetizations from app engagements altogether.

So it is a win-win situation for you. Plus, building an activity feed is as easy as spelling ABC with MirrorFly’s APIs. As you can easily integrate the activity feed capability into any app category you are working with. 

Be it Dating apps, E-commerce, Telehealth, or Education, you can build scalable, secure, and robust social activity feeds in minutes. 

And with our self-hosted SDKs, build a customizable chat solution and personalize it with the features you need. 

What do you say?

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Krishi Shivasangaran

Krishi is a Digital Marketer by choice & profession. She munches on topics relating to Technology, E-Commerce, Enterprise Mobility, Cloud Solutions and Internet of Things.

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