Mel Benson

See what members are currently most engaged with in real time in your community by using our new Trending Content feature included in our latest release, 4.7.0. 
Our new Trending Content feature, available on our Business & Corporate/Enterprise plans, automatically rounds up a list of engaging topics that are most active in the present moment within your community and proudly displays them for other members to see and contribute to. 
Trending Content is one of the best ways to stay on top of popular and current topics, as well as engage with other members in the here and now. It’s also a powerful method to inform search engines that your community is an authority in its niche because your members are constantly fueling the community fire.
How does the real time Trending Content feature work?
Our platform applies a value to different forms of engagement. This informs the Trending Content feature as to what it should display without delay.
This criteria is weighted and includes:
Replies: most valuable ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Topics that receive replies are the clearest sign a piece of content is trending.
Reactions: valuable ⭐️⭐
Your members are engaging with other members’ topics and replies. That’s great in helping to decide what is trending, but ultimately we want members to comment.
Views: somewhat valuable ⭐️
Visibility is important and plays a role in deciding whether a content item shows in the Trending Content section. 
 
The Trending Content may be visible in a block, or on your community's leaderboard.
Trending Content block:


 
Trending Content section on the leaderboard page:

 
The Trending Content feature may be turned on or off by visiting your Admin Control Panel (ACP) -> System -> Smart Community -> Features -> Trending Content.
 

 
Examples of useful Trending Content blocks in different types of communities:
 
Enterprise communities
If you’re in the corporate realm, displaying a list of trending content gives your influential clients and members an opportunity to see what’s shaping the ecosystem of your big-named brand. It also provides the company with an opportunity to monitor trends, then focus on more content like it to create another set of trending topics.
Educational communities
Display a list of trending content amongst your students. If there’s a particular question that captures the attention of your e-learning audience, chances are it’s engaging and thought-provoking. By including a Trending Content block in prominent areas of your community, students (and teachers) have an opportunity to weigh in and reach a solution together. 
Gaming communities
Include a Trending Content block inside your gaming community to drum up interest in new releases, share insider information and rumors about your favorite games and consoles and gauge what your fellow gamer peers are engaged with. 
Support communities
Should a critical support issue arise, your team will see what content items your clients are contributing to, assess, then solve.
News communities
Don’t be the last to know. When breaking news strikes, members tend to flood to the content item and share their two cents. Including a Trending Content block in a news community is the most efficient route to quickly keep your members in the loop regarding live news. 

Our new Trending Content feature is available in version 4.7.0. 
Thoughts? Drop us a line in the comments and let us know what you think. Should this blog post receive great engagement, you'll see it in our Trending Content feature located in our community forum. See you there!

You may have noticed many of the Invision Community apps getting updates recently. Over the last several months we have revealed revamped Events, Gallery and Downloads apps and have listened to how you have been using them.
As a result, we are including some further app refinements as a direct result of that feedback.
Gallery
Many of you asked for more customisation options with the new overview page so 🎉 it is now possible to hide and show different sections of the overview using simple toggle settings without the need for theme edits. You can also adjust the number of items that show.

Searching for existing Gallery images to include in topics has been a feature of Invision Community for a while but previously search has been limited to the image name. Now, when searching for images via the "Insert other attachment" editor option, searching by album name returns images from that album.
Gallerysearch.mp4
Events
We added a similar improved overview to Events in the October release but for those of you with multiple Calendars you wanted a quicker way to subscribe to all events.
It is now possible to subscribe to all events from a prominent button in the header of the overview page. Members can subscribe to an iCal feed or download an export in just a couple of clicks.
 
Clubs
We also decided to use this release to add a couple of updates to clubs.
The popular “Mark solved” functionality is now available directly in your clubs with control over who can mark the item solved. You can allow the topic author to mark questions as solved or leave it to moderators only.
…and last but not least we added a contextual search tweak so that when members are viewing a club, the search filter defaults to “This Club”

We hope these small but useful improvements are popular in your communities and we look forward to hearing more of your feedback and requests.
Is there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments.
The features discussed in this announcement are available in both Invision Community and Invision Community Classic.

The Invision Community platform is capable of integrating with other powerful services, creating a unified system of connections with the click of a button. 
One of the greatest benefits of integrating with Invision Community is instant expanded functionality. 
This is often done through an API (application programming interface), which allows our platform to seamlessly communicate with third-party developed software like Google, Zapier and SendGrid. 
We also use webhooks to integrate. Webhooks allow other services and applications to stay in sync with your community data or to perform an action after a specific event occurs in your community. Read more about them here.
I had a chat with one of our developers, @Daniel F, who walks us through webhooks, explains why they’re useful and shows us an example (see the video above). In the example he uses, we would...
 

Here are a few integrations we want to put on your radar:
 
Zapier
What is it? Zapier is a service that allows you to connect over 3,000 web apps. The Invision and Zapier integration can communicate with some of the Internet’s most wide-reaching platforms, including Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, Slack, Trello, Facebook Ads, ActiveCampaign, Zendesk, Asana, Salesforce, Hubspot, Discord, Stripe and more. Read our Zapier blog for more details (it’s worth your undivided attention!). 
An example: When a moderator posts a topic in a news forum, share it on Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms.


MapBox 
What is it? MapBox shares dynamic, performant, and customizable maps that can connect and visibly show where your members are around the world. 
An example: Create events that link to specific locations and specify where they’re taking place. 
 

 
Google Tag Manager
What is it? Google Tag Manager is a tag management system that allows you to add and update your own tags (snippets of code like a tracking pixel) onto your website for conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and more. 
Tags that can be incorporated include link clicks for events, scroll tracking, contact form abandonment, commerce shopping cart abandonment and more. 
Expect to see more functionality with Google Tag Manager in our platform later this year such as quantifying total amount of reactions in a post. 
An example: Tracking when a member clicks the ‘start new topic’ button.

 
Google Analytics
What is it? Google Analytics is a web analytics platform that shares statistics and basic analytical tools for SEO and marketing initiatives. 
Understanding your website’s data, including who is visiting, how often, for how long, device usage and more can better help you optimize your community. 
An example: Tracking unique visitors over the course of a year, then comparing that data to the previous year. Whether there’s an upward or downward trend, analyzing the data can help you create a plan of how to proceed, as well as understand what is (and isn’t) working. 
 
SendGrid

What is it? Sendgrid is a cloud-based email delivery system. It’s a vehicle for your community to send emails to your members.
An example: Sending a monthly newsletter using the Bulk Mail function in the admin control panel.

 
Integrations are an efficient way to take your Invision Community platform to the next level. There’s even more in your ACP that we didn’t discuss in this blog.
If you have an integration in place that you’d like to share with us, or have an idea, drop us a line in the comments and let us know.
 
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