Product Update: Social Graph and User Presence

It’s time for our March product update! We have exciting new developments to report, including the launch of two new community-driven features: social graph-as-a-service and user presence-as-a-service!

Social Graph-as-a-service (SGaaS) is an API-first service that enables LiveLike clients to let their users connect directly within their platform. With this powerful new feature, clients can enhance their user engagement and retention rates by allowing users to add friends and/or follow other users and connect with each other on the platform, a proven strategy for boosting audience engagement.

Thanks to the social graph feature, our clients can: 

• Hyper-personalize the user experience by letting users create their own network;
• Encourage social interactions and reinforce users’ sense of belonging on the platform;
• Retrieve critical first and zero-party data and gain a deeper understanding of their users;
• Integrate social graph capabilities with existing LiveLike features and user data

At its core, a social graph is a diagram that represents relationships between individuals within a social network, like Facebook or LinkedIn, or any other online platform community. SGaaS works by allowing developers to access and analyze the social graph data through an API. 

The API provides a set of endpoints that can be used to retrieve different types of information about a user’s social graph, such as their friends, followers, posts, and interactions. Developers can then use the API to analyze the data and generate insights or personalize the end-user experiences by integrating data-driven social features into their applications.

One of the key benefits of SGaas is that it saves developers the time and resources required to build and maintain their own social graph infrastructure. Instead, they can leverage the platform’s infrastructure and focus on building innovative applications that use social data.

SGaaS is a must–have for your users as it can significantly impact their online experience and meet these new user expectations for community-based platforms. It can help your users discover new connections and expand their social networks, increasing engagement and loyalty to your brand and platform.

Improving fan engagement and retention can be highly beneficial for your business, as it can lead to a significant increase in overall revenue. By providing developers with a powerful tool for accessing social graph data and creating hyper-personalized experiences, you will likely attract a greater amount of users, leading to increased user adoption and usage, as well as higher revenue from advertising and other monetization strategies.

Moreover, by providing a secure and standardized way for developers to access social graph data, SGaaS can help you build trust with your users and improve your reputation as a responsible platform. This can result in increased user loyalty and positive word-of-mouth, which can drive user acquisition and retention even further.

There are many potential use cases for social graph-as-a-service, such as:

• Making Personalized Recommendations: SGaaS can be used to analyze a user’s social graph data to provide personalized recommendations for content, products, or services. For example, a music streaming app could use SGaaS to suggest new artists or songs based on a user’s social connections and listening history.

• Analyzing Social Networks: SGaaS can be used to analyze social connections between users to identify influencers, communities, and trends. For example, a marketing company could use SGaaS to identify key influencers in a particular industry or social network and target them with personalized marketing campaigns.
  

• Detecting Fraudulent Behavior: SGaaS can be used to detect and prevent fraudulent activities by analyzing social connections and behavior patterns. For example, a financial institution could use SGaaS to identify fraudulent transactions by analyzing social connections between account holders.
  

• Matching Jobs to Potential Employees: SGaaS can be used to match job seekers with potential employers based on social connections and skills. For example, a job search platform could use SGaaS to suggest job openings to users based on their social connections.
  
• Moderating User-Generated Content: SGaaS can be used to identify and remove inappropriate or harmful content by analyzing social connections. For example, a social media platform could use SGaaS to detect and remove hate speech or cyberbullying based on social connections between users.

Along with Social Graphs, we’ve launched another community-building service: User Presence-as-a-Service or UPaaS. UPaaS is a cloud-based service that provides real-time information about a user’s online or mobile device presence to other applications, services, or users. UPaaS enables developers to build applications and services that can detect and respond to a user’s presence in real-time, allowing for more personalized and contextual experiences.

Thanks to the user presence feature, our clients can: 

• Monitor real-time user activity on their website or application
• Track user engagement and behavior patterns
• Identify areas for improvement and optimization
• Improve customer satisfaction and retention rates
• Make data-driven decisions based on user insights
• Enhance their overall user experience and user interface design

User presence as a service is a tool that allows businesses to monitor the activity of individual users on their website or application in real time. This service uses tracking technologies, such as cookies or browser fingerprinting, to identify and track users as they interact with the site or app. 

The data collected through user tracking is then used to create real-time reports and dashboards that show how many users are active on the site or app, what they are doing, and how long they are staying on the platform. This information provides businesses with insights into user behavior patterns, such as which pages or features are most popular, which ones are causing users to drop off, and which ones are leading to conversions.

UPaaS typically works by integrating with a user’s device, application, or browser to detect their presence and status, such as whether they are online, offline, idle, or busy. This information is then transmitted to other applications or services via an API, enabling them to respond to the user’s presence and provide a more relevant and engaging user journey.

By using this service, platform owners allow their users to:

• Determine status data to send more effective and targeted communications to users, including when they are online, offline, joining or leaving a channel, and subscribing or unsubscribing to a channel
• Collect critical information on the platform sections or experiences your users are engaging with
• List out which users are present in a given section of your experience
• Update custom User Presence status data like matchmaking IDs, lobby names, heart rates, etc.

User presence as a service is a must-have tool for end-users as it provides businesses with valuable insights into how users are interacting with their website or application. By monitoring user activity in real time, businesses can gain a better understanding of how users are using their site or app, which can help them optimize their user experience and engagement strategies.

One of the key benefits of user presence services is that they can improve the overall user experience. By providing businesses with insights into user behavior patterns, user presence services can help them identify areas for improvement and optimization. This information can be used to make the site or app more intuitive and easier to navigate, ultimately leading to higher user satisfaction and retention rates.

User presence services can also help businesses resolve issues more quickly. By identifying issues and errors in real time, businesses can reduce downtime and improve user satisfaction. Additionally, user presence services can help businesses personalize their engagement strategies by tracking user behavior and providing targeted marketing campaigns or personalized recommendations.

Another important benefit of user presence services is increased security. By tracking user behavior, user presence services can help businesses identify and prevent fraudulent activity, such as account takeovers or other forms of cybercrime.

There are many potential use cases for User Presence-as-a-Service. Some examples include:

• Messaging Apps: A messaging app can use User Presence to display the online or offline status of a user’s contacts. This can be useful for users who want to know if someone is available to chat before sending a message. Additionally, the app can provide feedback to users when they attempt to message an offline contact. This can help to prevent frustration and ensure that messages are sent to users who are more likely to see them.
• Fitness Apps: A fitness app can leverage User Presence to show which classmates and friends are online and available for virtual workouts or to share their fitness progress. This can help users connect with each other quickly to find exercise buddies and provide motivation for staying active. Additionally, the app can display which fitness classes their online friends are currently in, allowing users to join in if they are interested or simply be motivated by their friends’ progress. 
• Gaming Apps: In a gaming app, User Presence can be used to indicate which friends are currently online and available to play games and connect with. Additionally, User Presence can show the game that an online friend is currently playing on their profile so that other friends can discover new games with them or quickly join in. User Presence can also enable users to find and join game lobbies where their friends are waiting, providing a more social gaming experience and increasing their engagement with the app.