Updated: 22.05.2024, by: Ingrid Pauchon
Estimated time to read: 4 - 5 min.
How to create a Feed
Create message
Click on Feed and set your preferences:
Message vs. Social - determine whether your feed will display messages or latest posts from your Social Wall.
Number of items in feed - select how many messages you want to display in your feed.
Select categories to filter the message list - click the + and select the category from the dropdown. You can add more categories.
Sort by & show date - select in the dropdown how you want messages to be sorted and shown in the feed.
Visible after published to contact - This determines how long after first publishing to a contact the message is visible in the feed to that specific contact.
This can be set to indefinitely (the content will be visible forever), or 1 week (the content will be visible for 1 week after first published to contact), 2 weeks 3 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months or 1 year.
Show search Bar - Allows you to add a search bar. More about this here.
Show social statistics - Allows you to show social stats such as: how many have opened the message, how many have commented and how many have liked. More about this here.
Show categories - Allows you to define whether or not the categories will be shown in the feed.
Show only unread content - Allows you to define that only unread content will be shown in this feed. Once it's read, the content will no longer be visible.
Allow to load more content - Allows to define that the user can load more content, this is specially relevant if you know that the feed will be long for the users. This is on by default but can be turned off.
Hide feed when no content - Allows you to define that the feed should disappear as a whole for the contact when there is no content for him/her. With this turned on, the contact will no longer see the "Nothing to read here" message if there isn't any content available.
Use squared thumbnails - defines the image thumbnails to be squared. This is on by default but can be turned off.
Promote "Quiz Retake" - This one is interesting if the feed contains messages that contains quizzes.
Pinned content
The pinned content section allows you to pin content to the top of your feed.
Select categories to filter the message list - click the + and select the category from the dropdown. You can add one pinned category.
Pinned after published to contact - This determines how long after first publishing to a contact the message is visible in the pinned section of the feed to that specific contact.
Search in Feeds
We'd recommend you always make it possible for your end-users to search for key words in a search bar (enabling Show search Bar) and add the option to Allow to load more messages (under Advanced options).
As you add more content, the overview will stay the same, but end-users can always see what was previously published to them by loading more messages in their individual feeds.
Promoting quizzes in Feeds
If the feed is going to contain training, we'd say you should promote quiz retake as well.
How many have seen, liked and commented
Our experience shows that employees really like to know how many of their colleagues have seen, liked or commented a post. This information will encourage them to access and read the messages too.
In the feed you can see:
How many have seen a message
How many liked (if the message contains social stats/like module)
How many commented (if message contains a feedback module)
This is optional and if you wish to change the settings and do/undo them you can go to the Feed module > Advanced options > Show social statistics.
The visual design of the feed in the app
The Feed is structured so that your messages always appears in the same structured way, do they contain different media files, different length in headers, sub-headers etc.
The app has a structured and compact design, so you can always be sure that your feeds look nice, no matter the title, description or image that you add in your message. Here's the list of the visual content of the feed:
Visible category to show context
Squared thumbnails which gives a structure to the feed
Adding information to thumbnails if video content is included
Previous training scores shown for recall
Time stamp: “a minute ago”, “2 days ago”, etc. (After a week, date will be displayed. After a year, annual figures will be displayed)
Create navigation to segmented area of the app
With the new feature "Hide feed if no content" we can use a feed to create a navigation from eg. the app homepage to a segmented area of the app that is only supposed to be accessible for a specific group of contacts.
The message preview in the feed will act as the navigation to the segmented area - and the feed will only be visible for a contact if there is content in the feed.
This can be useful in many situations and in this article we will show how it can be used to create a navigation to local department landingpages of a global company.
We will refer to the feed as a "navigation feed" in the following description of how to build this navigation.
1. Create a category for the feed
First, create a category for the navigation feed. Go to admin settings, messages, create a new category and save. In this case we have created the category "Local department".
2. Create the feed
Next, create the navigation feed for the local department landingpages. We want the navigation on the App homepage so we have navigated to the homepage and added a feed module with messages:
Select the number of messages you want to display in the feed - in this case we only want to show 1 message
Add the category that you want show in the feed - in this case we have added the "Local Department" category
Choose the sorting order and show date - in this case we have chosen "Alphabetical order" (but actually it can be any of them, since we only have one message and therefor no sorting) - and "None" in the show date option
Chose for how long time you want the messages to be visible after they have been published to the contact - in this case we want the messages to be visible forever, so we have chosen "Indefinitely"
Open the Advanced options
Tick on "Hide feed when no content" - this setting will make sure that the feed will only be visible for a contact if there is a local landingpage published to the contact
Tick on the "Use squared thumbnails"
Tick off the rest of the options under the advanced settings - since we are only using the feed for navigation we do not want to show categories, social statistics etc.
Now your navigation feed is ready and you can create your local department landingpages. Remember to add the "Local Department" category to the landingpages and publish them to the specific groups of contacts.
3. How it looks in the app
Let's take a look in the app and see how the navigation to the segmented area will look!
Employee with a local landingpage: Employee without a local landingpage:
Employees with a local landingpage will have the navigation in the top of the App homepage (left screen), while employees without a local landingpage will only see the app homepage with the news feed (right screen).
Tags: Feed, show in feed, overview, news, messages, search bar, categories, timestamp, social wall