Highlight the content that attracts your readers

Your app is designed to give access to your content in a fluid, efficient, mobile-friendly user interface. So, what you want to do first, when you put content into your app, is to sync the last published posts of your website.

 

We also already talked about adding filters to show categories or on predefined searches, in order to refine your app's content.

 

But, do you think you really know what really catches your readers attention? GoodBarber knows :)
A good way to enhance the user experience in your app is to push content that has already been proven to be popular content!

 

You've probably already noticed the Popular section in your GoodBarber backend. Its goal is exactly to display your most popular content.

We'll review together everything that you should know to use it efficiently.

To establish the list of your posts (or videos, podcasts, photos, ...) that are the most popular, we need to rely on figures that reflects your redress's interest.

 

Our algorithm will take into account one or more of these figures:

- Number of views of the article or of the video

- Number of comments on the article on on the video

- Average rating of the video

 

It's the reason why the Popular section is not available for each type of source: only the ones that return a figure usable to make a ranks can benefit from the popular section.

 

The calculation of a content's popularity can change from a source to another (WordPress, YouTube, WMaker, ...).

For instance, a popular section plugged to your WMaker website will take into account the number of views of each post to establish the ranking. A popular section plugged to a WordPress blog will look at the number of comments of the posts to rank them by popularity.

 

For your YouTube or Dailymotion videos, it's the service itself that calculates the popularity of your uploads.

Displaying your contents ranked by popularity, it's a good thing. But if your blog is online since years, or if you are an early YouTuber, your blog or your YouTube channel contain probably some posts published a long time ago ... and they have of course earned a huge amount of views or comments.

 

It can distort the ranking by pushing older entries on top, instead of your more recent posts. You popular section shouldn't become a chronological ranking of your publications: older contents on top and newer at last.

 

It's the reason why you can set a period of time that will be taken into account for the ranking: it's a good way to make the list evolve on a regular basis.

 

For instance, for your WMaker videos, you can choose a period of time to display the popular uploads: last 24h, last week, last month, last 6 months, or the whole period since your site is online.

Most of the time, when you create a Popular section in your app, it will be presented as another way to sort the items of your main content source. If we take the example of a typical blog app, we'll see that: you are going to set a first section, let's call it "Home", in which you are going to display the last posts of your blog. Next you'll set one (or serveral) filtered section, using the category filter tool (and you'll maybe set additional sub-filters in each section). You'll also add a "Bookmarks" section into your app, so your users will be able to save your articles. And finally, you'll set a Popular section, synced with your blog, and filtered for the current month.

 

To do so, jump in the Content > Sections menu of your GoodBarber backend, add a new "Popular" section, and choose a content source. Here, there are two options: use an existing source, or add a new source.

 

You should always prefer the first option (use an existing source), most of the time it's the better way to proceed.

Here is a summary of the different sources available.

That's all for this quick overview of the features offered by the Popular section.

Up to you to use it in your app now!