Introducing UpContent 2.0: The Release of User Profiles and Sharing Topics and Updates to Relevance and Influence
behind-the-scenes
Marissa Burdett
Marissa Burdett
As anyone in the tech industry knows, it takes a lot of time and elbow grease to gather feedback from users, choose what areas of your product to improve and build upon, write and implement the code, test the new features, fix the bugs, and then share the outcomes with the market. After releasing UpContent as a Hootsuite integration in spring 2015 and then introducing the product as a single application a few months later, we have since been working on our first big release of new features. And now we can finally introduce them to you!
Related: Navigating through the Foundation Stage of a Technology Startup
We invite you to check out our newly designed site, improved user experience, and exciting feature additions and then let us know what you think. We’d also be awfully grateful if you shared the news with your friends.
Oh, and in celebration of all of these exciting features, we have a special gift that will give one of you everything you need to make your content marketing dreams come true for an entire year. Scroll down to see what it is!
We believe content is currency because it gives people the ability to enter into powerful conversations and build strong communities with one another. Therefore, we knew that we wanted to give our users the opportunity to foster and build upon those relationships within our product. The first step in opening up opportunities for collaboration is by creating user profiles.
While our quick and simple onboarding process remains the same, users now have the option to create a complete profile by providing a username, location, company, industry, website, and Gravatar image. By creating a user profile, you will now have the ability to share topics (see below).
In the future, these user profiles will be critical in providing organizational support, group billing, and access control.
Through discussions with our in-house beta testers, we discovered that there was a desire to be able to share topics with others. For instance, because many of our Community Elf account managers work on the same or similar clients, they wanted the option to share their UpContent suggestions with one another instead of having to recreate the topic for themselves. By creating user profiles, we were then able to provide this functionality.
Whether you have an UpContent account or not, you can now view a shared topic’s suggestions and apply any of our sorting filters and curate your favorites to social media. When you are logged into your account, you can bookmark this topic for future reference and share any of the articles or blog posts with your networks, or you can duplicate and add the topic to your list to share, favorite, delete, and tweak the suggestions. If you want to share your topics with your friends or followers, simply click the link button next to your topic on your navigation and you will be provided with a link. There is even an option to add that topic to an RSS reader, if you prefer.
Our relevance filter already displays the most applicable results based on your search queries, but now there’s an even better way to view those suggestions. Recognizing that individuals are often interested in breaking down a topic by subtopics, we wanted a way to drill down and find these individual discussions related to a larger topic. By partnering with Infomous, we now have a Relevance Graph view that allows you to explore even more specific topics under the branch of your search.
Our most exciting update to our UpContent feature set is the improvement of our Influence filter. Not long after we released UpContent, we began discussing ways to make this filter even more effective. Previously, the influence filter would take more of a macro approach to sorting suggestions, but we wanted to be able to zero in more specifically on the topic at hand and give our users the ability to identify the right content published by the sources that have the highest-ranked influence, not just the sources that are the most popular.
Related: Everyone Has Influence: How to Stand Out in a Social Media World
Luckily, we found a solution that Scott Rogerson, our CEO, had utilized previously in another context. By examining the centrality of an item in a graph, we can now measure influence within that network. We teamed up with six students from Carnegie Mellon University who created a proof of concept and were able to effectively demonstrate the results. Now that it is built into our product, the influence filter is more robust and even has a graph view that illustrates influence and the subsequent relationships between articles and blog posts.
You may have already noticed our removal of video and social posts from suggestions, but all other functions and filters remain the same. In addition to the features listed above, we have revamped our application site to match the changes we made to our main site design. You’ll notice the introduction of softer colors, more white space, an easier-to-read font, and, our favorite, our new vertical suggestion cards that make viewing and scrolling through suggestions even easier on the eyes.
Whew! What a rollercoaster ride we’ve been on. Thanks for supporting us along the way and for all of your suggestions and feedback. We’re always looking to improve UpContent, so let us know what you’re looking for in a content discovery tool. Maybe you’ll see your idea in the new product features launch!
Important Update: This giveaway is now closed. Stay tuned for future opportunities for prizes!
In honor of all of the excitement, we’re giving away the Utimate Content Marketer’s Toolkit: a full year’s access to THREE of our favorite content marketing tools. One lucky winner will receive:
It’s the ideal content marketing workflow and it could be YOURS.
You can enter to win by clicking here. May the odds be ever in your favor!
