Something's Missing: Our Decision to Remove Video and Social Posts from Suggestions
Behind-the-Scenes
Scott Rogerson
Scott Rogerson
As we near the release of our newest iteration of UpContent, you will notice a prominent omission from the content set – social media and video content.
The root of this decision traces back to the reason we created the product – to find the best content to enter into the conversations you want to have, faster.
We have spent much of 2015 listening and analyzing the behavior of our current customer base to better understand how UpContent can be valuable to you, both as a professional tool and a method for personal consumption. After taking this feedback into consideration, it felt necessary to remove these two areas of our content suggestions in order to move forward with our goals as a product and as a team.
In speaking with current and potential customers, we generally received a great deal of interest when recounting our mission to unearth the best blog and news content within a specific topic. However, when discussing our ability to identify relevant video and social content, we were often met with a comparison to many of the excellent social listening or video search technologies that already existed.
When looking at the activity conducted by our customers since launch, this feedback was reinforced by data. For example, video and social content demonstrated a 30% higher bounce rate than news and blog content and drove less than 2.5% of all customer actions in the last 90 days. It was apparent that our first pass in these areas was measurably less successful than that in news and blogs.
Though we feel firm in our decision to remove video and social content from our suggestions, in no way does this decision indicate a belief that these content types are not important to the conversation. A picture remains “worth a thousand words,” and we intend to re-introduce this type of content to our technology in a way that lives up to our standards of discovery – making the process of evaluating and sorting content as simple and efficient as possible.
Though we plan on reintroducing visual content to our suggestions, there are no current plans to include social content to our suggestions. Through our research, there are already numerous successful social media listening technologies available in our industry, many of whom do an excellent job finding the important conversations occurring across all social channels. Further, it was decided by the team that the sourcing, monitoring, and evaluating of these social conversations required a wholly different approach than the content that developed them. For these reasons, it was determined that moving forward with this effort would do more to diffuse, rather than strengthen, the value of UpContent to its customers.
I apologize for any complication this may cause and look forward to UpContent continuing to be your “go-to” source for finding the best content to power your conversations. It is our hope that you will find that the upcoming features to be released in January, and related platform integrations, will exceed your expectations.
Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Feel free to contact me at scott@upcontent.com or via twitter @scottarogerson. I reply to every email and direct message, and look forward to hearing from you.
Thank you for being a part of the UpContent community!