We're excited to announce some new improvements to your Latest Activity Feature. These improvements are currently in Beta — instructions for enabling them on your site are at the bottom of this post.
First, you can now integrate your Twitter and Facebook Page items directly into your network’s Activity Feed. This is a great way to kick-start growth on your site and leverage your activity across the social web.
Second, we're introducing "Top News," a new way to view activity on your site. This feed of activity works in tandem with your current Latest Activity feed. It’s up to you how to curate your Top News. You have options to include your Admins' activity, as well activity from Featured Members. This lets you set up an automatically curated feed. It’s ideal for busy Ning Networks that want to spotlight top content that maybe needs to stick around in the activity feed for a bit longer than most activity.
You can see Social Integration and Top News in action in this screenshot:
How should you use it? Here’s a few ways you might want to use these new Activity Feed options.
Boost your activity early on
If you’re just getting started with a network, you might not have a lot of activity — yet! You might want to use Top News as a way to keep the most important content from you and your admins directly in front of the community in those early days.
Focus on a high-profile NC
If your network revolves around one very important person — like ThisIs50 — you might want to use the Top News feed to spotlight what they are doing. You can even pull in Twitter and Facebook content to make this feed a one-stop destination for fervent fans.
Spotlight core content creators
Maybe your network has a core group of people who drive activity and contribute the most content. A few examples of networks like this that may be focused on publishing or broadcasting content:
- A group of mom bloggers who typically drive the conversation across a network when they post a new blog.
- A band using a network to keep their fans up-to-date about what each of the five band members are up to week-by-week.
- A community of practice that hangs on the word of a handful of experts in the field whenever they post.
Make your members stars
Maybe you just want to spotlight your featured members’ content. That may be the best way of all to use Top News. This could present a whole new way to think about what being featured means on your network.
Want to try it out?
To enable this beta feature on your Ning Network today, simply sign in to your site and navigate to Ning Labs. You'll see all the controls and options from there. Once we ship this feature to the entire Ning Platform, these controls will move to the Activity Settings page.
Of course, we’re open to hearing how you will use it, so let us know in the comments.
Replies
I'm missing something, I can't get anything to show up in top news, from myself or my admin. I have gone through the settings and my top news is empty. Any ideas?
I disabled it then re-enabled to see if that worked but it's still the same. It would be a really good feature to use for important announcements. I hope someone reads this and takes a look soon.
Hi Eric, I just thought I would mention something else thats started happening on the top news. I use it to keep important messages or announcements and just have that bit set to the nc. You type a message on the latest activity which is ok and then it shows in the top news ( ive changes it to 1940s Social Network News ) as expected, fine so far. I come back some time later and now the top news is empty but the message still shows on the main latest activity so it seems that the top news feed is clearing itself out ?
Anything on this would be helpful.
Hi all,
quick question: for several weeks now I have been using the Top News / Everything function on my Latest Activity stream and it's been working like a charm. Yesterday though, all of a sudden my FB avatar will no longer appear next to the entire list of Top News, while it does show up next to the items on the Everything list.
Is this a choice by Ning that for some reason I am not getting?
Or is it a glitch?
Thanks!
QY
Hi Eric, you got it, that's exactly what I am talking about.
I have added two pictures in attachment, "everything.jog" and "topnews.jpg."
In "everything", you will see that the same content pulled up from our organisation's Facebook page, WILL display our Facebook avatar/logo on the left of each post, while the "top news" section used to do the same, but stopped a few days ago.
Yes, I know about it being in Beta but, in rebuilding my site recently, it is becoming such a vital part of my network that I really don't want to turn it off for a glitch like this.
Is it necessary for me to submit a ticket on this or will this suffice?
Kind regards, QY
Thanks Eric, I'll do that!
Ive added the new activity feed which is great but I did notice one problem that it doesn't seem if anyone else has noticed. I created some new pages to go on the network at a later stage and checked the only administrators box can view these pages, this I really didn't want to be seen until I was fnished with them but they came up under the Top News section anyway. Luckily I saw it in time and deleted the posts from the feed.
Is there a way for an admin to feature himself? I cannot find this option.
Here is why i ask-maybe you can share a work around.
I use "/pages " on my site specifically for industry news and I would like the news stories to stay on the "Top News" area of activity feed longer-often the stories are quickly buried by comments etc-even before a search engine can spider them from the main page.
Really for now all I want in "Top News" is "pages" and I have found as admin I cannot "Feature Myself" to make this happen-any other suggestions?
Thanks
Thanks for the reply Eric,
I thought the same thing but when I go to "My Page" the "feature" and "Unfeature" links are missing and the "Admin Options" link is disabled.
Anyway i can correct this?
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