Custom Topic and Author Follows
Clearly identify what users can Follow on your site to drive reengagement.
Viafoura's Custom Follow feature allows you to easily call out what users can follow and receive updates on for a personalized experience.
We provide a customizable button that invites your user to "follow" the topic or author on the page. When new content is published, users who subscribe to these updates are notified in their [notification tray] (https://documentation.viafoura.com/docs/onsite-notification-tray) when you trigger a simple, automated script.
Users can easily manage what they are following within the notification tray in the Community tab or using a custom preference center. The customization and flexibility of the feature allow for a user to subscribe to:
- Their favourite authors
- Topics of interest ('news', 'local politics', 'favourite team', 'elections', 'celebrity name' etc.)
- Serialized content (podcasts, etc.)
- And many more use cases
Note
We recommend having a publishing topics strategy before starting implementation to ensure users do not over receive notifications. You may want to limit a single topic associated per article to prevent duplicate notifications.
Implementing Your Custom Topics
Implementation of the custom follow tool starts with implementing the following code snippet on your site where you want the Follow button to appear:
<div class="viafoura">
<vf-topic-follow
topic-id="politics"
topic-name="Politics"
topic-type="topic"
show-count="true"
minimum-count="0"
></vf-topic-follow>
</div>
Parameters
You can customize how the Custom Follow tool displays and renders within your page using the following parameters:
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| topic-id | Defines the unique identifier for the topic. This id identifies the topic to Viafoura and yourself but is only visible in your code, not to the end-user. Type: String (avoid using special characters). Required: Yes. |
| topic-name | Defines the name of the topic that you want your user to be able to subscribe to. For example, you can use the value "Viafoura News" or the name of an author. This will be visible to the user in the community tab of the Tray once the topic has been followed. Type: String. Required: Yes. |
| topic-type | Defines the type of the topic. For example, you can use the value "Author" if the user can follow an author/writer. This can be any custom string you wish. This will be visible to the user. Type: String (avoid using special characters). Optional: Yes. Default value: topic. |
| show-count | Defines the number of followers the topic has if you choose to show it. Type: Boolean (true or false). Optional: Yes. Default value: false. |
| minimum-count | Defines the minimum number of followers to show in the label, if you choose to show it. Type: Integer. Optional: Yes. Default value: 0. |
Follow Button
The default Follow button is customizable with CSS.
The appearance of the default Follow button:
The appearance of the default Follow button with a count of its followers:
Notifying Users of New Content by Topic
When you publish a new page including one of your specified topics, you'll want to notify your users of the new content.
Using the Viafoura Broadcast Notifications API, you can notify topic subscribers of new content and include your own title, description, image and URL. We do not provide a GUI to send broadcast messages at this time.
You can add a script to your CMS to trigger the notifications automatically upon publishing new content containing your topic.
Please visit this page for more information on your next steps in implementing notifications:
https://documentation.viafoura.com/docs/broadcast-notifications-instructions
Updated 6 months ago