Increasing user loyalty with JomSocial 2.6

New My Group Updates view to get users connected to updates from their participated groups. All in one place.

Have you heard the news? JomSocial 2.6 Alpha Two has just been released yesterday at our development site. The new Alpha Two concentrates on our social nodes, the melting pot of user contributed photos, all those fancy videos, the listing of events, and of course promoting user groups. 

Back in JomSocial 2.2 and below, we have one interesting feature that was under-utilized and has a seemingly dull appearance. This specific feature was calling for a greater purview in the context of improving user loyalty on your ever expanding community.

Featured Albums listing in JomSocial 2.2. 'Houston, we have a problem.'

Featured Albums listing in JomSocial 2.4. Slight improvement there. [See it in 2.4]

Lo and behold, the facelifted Featured Items. 

 Featured Albums in JomSocial 2.6. "Launch Control. This is Houston. We are go for Launch!" [See it now!]

The purpose of these improvements is to add value and better highlight featured items. In previous versions of JomSocial, these items, while being positioned at the very top of each social nodes, they lack ‘character’ and ‘visibility’ that differentiate them from the rest of the listing. It was so easy for users to simply scroll down and missing these featured items altogether, hence rendering the goal of emphasizing interesting items futile.

There are numerous advantages that we foresee with the new design. First, it will definitely boost the click-through for each featured items, hence giving them the attention that they deserve. 

Take Featured Albums for example, you could easily add / remove items to the featured listing and make them appropriate with on-going competitions / events / holiday seasons. With the recent Christmas and New Year celebration, you might want to highlight gleeful albums contributed by your users and the best way to achieve it is by simply marking them as featured.

 Featured Events in JomSocial 2.6. Notice the clarity of time and date for each event? [See it now!]

Similar to Albums, you can also highlight upcoming events organized in your community. Some entrepreneurial webmasters might even take this further by perhaps selling this Featured allocation to organizations / event organizers who wish to be ‘seen’. 

Featured video section takes the cream. You can now even play the videos directly in the Featured section. [See it here] compared with [the old one].

All these improvements, while not entirely addition of new features, are actually beneficial in getting your users loyal to the community, and prolonging their time on the site with each session. It will generate a livelier listing whereby administrators may award some users with the attention they deserve. These improvements also are in-tune with our long-term goal of adapting content discovery techniques within our social platform.

Improved usability in Photo Gallery navigation. [See it here] compared with [the old one].