by Frank H on Fri 18 August 2017
In the last article we talked about several use cases that benefit from featured content within a user generated content stream. We showed situations where this is required and extremely valuable. There are many different factors in where and when to place your featured content to get the most engagement without being ignored, or annoying your readership.
A previous article described adding featured content to your social media signage display. With the addition of the new "Inserted" featured content mode, other web and campaign based use models are now possible.
Spotlyte gives you the necessary tools to configure the placement, frequency, and styling of your sponsored and featured content. Let's take a look at exactly how that's done.
Creating and Managing Featured Content
Creating featured content is easy, and can be done in 2 ways:
- From existing/crawled content
- Explicitly created content
De-Featuring content will put it back into the regular/main stream of content. You can also define the order of featured content, which controls the order in which it's inserted into your feed. Or the order in which it plays during a "Full Page" featured ad. These can be found on the "More Actions..." menu item in the lower right part of a Featured Post.
The following video shows how you can create featured content:
Creating a Featured Action
A featured action is a specific call to action for your reader. For example, something like "Sign up Now", "Follow Us on Twitter", or "Join Our Cause".
In the following image, the "Visit our Centurion Lounges" is a Featured action created for this campaign. As readers explore and browse through the other user generated content in this campaign, this featured action will be periodically sprinkled throughout their browsing. It gets inserted just like another post, so it doesn't disrupt nor negatively impact the user's reading experience.
Create your specific call to action text, and button that links to your desired action. These will be interspersed throughout your feed. The following video shows how easy this is done:
Featured Content Mode
Featured content can either be "Inserted" or "Full Page" mode. Inserted will intersperse your list of featured content throughout your stream periodically. The frequency can be configurable based on your preference. The feed will cycle through your list of featured content and insert an item at every number of post that you specify. It's important to keep a good balance of different number of featured content vs the frequency of insertion so that it your featured content isn't considered too distracting for the reader.
The "Full Page" mode is currently only supported by the Waterfull signage theme. In this mode, the featured content takes over the entire screen like a commercial playing in between your TV show. In this case, you can define the frequency in minutes in how often your featured content "commercial" will play over your regular feed.
The configuration of the Featured Content style and frequency can be found in the Spotlyte display editor under the "Customize Content" panel.
Featured Content Style
Your featured posts can have a different color to accentuate the fact that it is special. Configuring these colors to match the branding color and style of your brand or sponsor will make it immediately obvious that the content should receive extra attention amongst the other aggregated and curated content.
The way a feature post is styled will change based on which theme you've chosen. For certain themes where the post caption are shown, the background of the post itself takes on the branding color. Whereas image only posts may only show a "Featured" badge in the upper left corner. And finally, a theme like Digital Magazine, will show Featured items in a larger format so that they visually stand out in the layout.
This badge indicating an item is Featured can optionally be configured so that it doesn't show.
Featured posts can also be customized using Advanced CSS option with other styling options to make them stand out. For example, let's say you wanted your featured content to also have a dark black, rounded border, you would customize it with this CSS:
.profile-env section.profile-feed .profile-stories .storybox article.story.feature-post {
border: solid 4px black;
border-radius: 5px;
}
Watch the following video for a quick how to on customization and styling options to make your Featured content look just the way you want it:
Choose a modern social media aggregator with simple to use tools and publication methodologies that enables you to feature content with ease. Featuring and highlighting featured content and actions within your branded content hub helps reinforce your brand message and drive readers towards your goals.
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