November 2016 Product Update: The Topic Gallery & Better Emails
Behind-the-Scenes
Nick Sloan
Nick Sloan
Two months have passed since our last product update, and we decided it was time to get back on track! We’ve been busy bees, and a lot of our work these past months will be revealed a bit further down the road, but there are a handful of things that we have already released and can’t wait to tell you about!
UpContent users have created thousands of incredible topics across a broad range of subjects. We’ve been so impressed that we wanted to showcase some of our favorites! To that end, we created the Topic Gallery.
The Topic Gallery is a curated page of the best topics that our community cares about most. Each month we take a look at the six most common categories that UpContent Topics fall into. Then we select our favorite topics from each of those categories, and we share a preview of each of those topics on the Gallery. If we choose your topic we will reach out to let you know that you have been selected to appear in the Gallery.
This is just the beginning for the Topic Gallery though. We are already working on usability and design improvements, better performance and result quality, and, of course, new and interesting topics!
Brighten up! We’ve retired our drab plain text transactional emails in favor of something with a just a bit more flair. We have replaced them with the same simple template that we have already been using for our blog announcements. We’re sure you’ll find the new look far easier on the eyes!
To complement our new template, we have introduced better copy to all of our emails, letting you take action with confidence.
We have also introduced some new emails. First, since all of our new users are given a 30-day trial of our Professional Plan, we thought it would be great to let you know when that trial is about to end through your email. Users should now receive an update three days before the end of their trial. Second, if your account downgrades to the Personal Plan, whether from a trial or a manual downgrade, we’ll send you an email letting you know about the switch.
Our last new email goes hand-in-hand with a recent change we made to topic updates. In order to continue providing the same great service to even more users, we have begun hibernating topics that haven’t been viewed in the past month. A hibernated topic still counts against your total number of active topics, but it will not be updated as frequently. If you are regularly viewing your topics in My.UpContent, the Hootsuite Stream, or the Hootsuite Content Source, your topic will stay active and continue bringing in new data on our regular update schedule. If one of your topics does go into hibernation, we’ll send you an email to let you know so that you can wake it up again.
Our RSS feeds are getting an upgrade too! We’ve recently added Media RSS Content elements to our feed items. That should make it much easier for your favorite RSS reader or consumer to identify the images associated with our posts. Our feeds aren’t done yet, but we’re working hard to make them even better and more stable. We’ll keep you posted as they continue to develop.
In addition to the items mentioned above we have fixed many bugs, small and large. We have a lot planned for the rest of 2016 and even more on the roadmap for 2017! We can’t wait to share what comes next!
Check out our past UpContent Product Updates: