Boost your Site's Engagement by Adding a Newsfeed Widget

Have you thought about adding a newsfeed widget to your website or app?You might think: What for? The reason is simple: nowadays visitors are very demanding and will expect something new, something that catches their attention right away!You have only a few seconds of attention span to get them engaged. If you fail, they will probably leave and that's and incredibly painful metric for SEO: bounce rate.Engaging those who end up on your site is the key to getting the desired action you want from visitors. If visitors are bouncing within seconds of getting to your site, it’s likely that you haven’t offered anything they are interested in on the page they landed on. A great way to boost engagement and decrease your bounce rate is to add a newsfeed widget on your site that can get users’ attention on any page.

Here's how a newsfeed widget helps engage and boost conversion:

Hopefully, you’ll be getting a variety of traffic to your site through various pages. There are likely several pages that will be acting as landing pages depending on what page or content on your site becomes popular organically or through ads. However, it’s unlikely that every single visitor coming to a page will be engaged by what’s there. A newsfeed widget helps you effortlessly offer more to visitors and increase the chances that they are interested.

For a new visitor: catch their attention right away!

Let's say you have a new visitor to your site. You want to catch their attention right away. But web users might get intimidated by aggressive banners or pop-ups.A newsfeed widget is an excellent, discreet alternative. You can implement a newsfeed widget that opens up after clicking in "What's new button. Visitors will likely be curious about your latest updates and by doing this you are one step closer to them.

You have an engaged visitor: now let's turn it into a lead.

How does a visitor become a lead? Well, you need to be able to identify them and to contact them!It's very unlikely that a visitor becomes a customer right away or just from landing into your site: that's why getting their email is such an important step.You have several ways of doing it, although the most commonly used one is (of course): offer something in exchange! Nowadays information is a priced item and people know it, so they won't give it for free.You can offer either information (an e-book, a report, etc) or a discount or coupon, depending on the type of business.Call to actions are extremely important in this stage, as they invite visitors to actually act upon your request. That's why it's SO important to have call to actions in different parts of your website, including your newsfeed widget.

For returning users: show what's new and how your website is updated.

So, you have a lead now that you want to turn into a recurring user or returning buyer.You caught their attention in the first place, but you need to keep that engagement up and running to ensure they come back. And the best way to do this is by showing what are the updates in your site especially tailored for each user.Newsfeed widgets are particularly helpful in this sense for e-Commerce sites. Once your customers know where to find your latest products, they will navigate through your newsfeed widget to get updated:

You can offer different products and deals in the sidebar or footer to increase chances potential customers find something they’re interested in. Learn more on how to boost e-Commerce customer engagement.

A newsfeed widget can help turn any page into a landing page.

Plenty of websites, e-Commerce, SaaS, or otherwise, use blogs and content to drive relevant traffic. Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing and generates 3x as many leads. But a focus of content marketing should be engaging customers beyond just one post and lead them to desired actions. Here is where you can use a newsfeed widget to offer visitors more beyond just one blog post. You can offer deals, sign ups, products, other blog posts, videos, etc. The most successful websites and platforms are the ones that offer continuous streams of content (think Instagram’s “discover”). Adding an element of curated content helps turn a post into more than just a post, but a place to engage and get visitors clicking through to more. Every page should act like this so widgets in the sidebar and footer can be really effective and simple. Read more on how to get blog subscribers to read new posts.

Make your site look more dynamic with a newsfeed widget.

Without updates and news, your site can end up looking stagnant. With a widget that shows there is consistent change and new, exciting updates, your site can look much more dynamic. With social apps, news sites, and forums that constantly update, people are hooked on checking for new updates. We don’t want to “miss out”. You can do the same with your site with a newsfeed app. It makes it easy to show that you are constantly adding more: products, content, posts, videos, etc. The best way to add a newsfeed to any page of your site is Beamer. Beamer is even easier to install and more dynamic than a typical, limited newsfeed widget. Beamer simply requires that you copy and paste a script or install the plugin to add a discreet newsfeed that can be opened on any page of your site. Visitors can open your Beamer feed by clicking a “What’s New” tab in the navigation or an icon in the interface on any page. They can then explore a sidebar of updates. It’s the most visually appealing and simple way to add a newsfeed to every page of your site. Beamer goes beyond just a newsfeed. You can segment updates by demographic, location, language, and past behavior on your site to better target your audience with updates relevant to them.

Newsfeed widgets can add more visual elements to your website without large images or a redesign.

You can also use a newsfeed to break up a very text-heavy page. With a newsfeed like Beamer you can add photos, videos, GIFs, and colorful CTAs. Engagement for posts more than doubles on social platforms and blogs when you simply add some visual elements like a photo or video. Articles with one photo get 94% more views! It’s important to have a feed where people can see a visual representation of your post rather than just a “recent posts” lists. Using a Beamer feed makes this really easy and goes beyond by allowing you to add video which can increase conversions and engagement by over 80%. You don’t have to add large images and videos which can slow things down or redesign your blog posts or pages to include new content, just add Beamer to your site.

Keep engaging your users off-site with a newsfeed widget + push notifications.

Everybody is used to getting notifications nowadays, and we actually sign up for them to avoid this FOMO ("fear of missing out") feeling. Learn more about how to use FOMO to increase sales here.By adding a newsfeed widget with push notifications, you can ensure that all your subscribed users are notified of your latest updates (or at least the most important ones) even if they are not in your site.Those who gave permission for you to send a web push notification, will get an emerging message in their browser each time you send an update with this feature. Learn more about web push notifications and how they work here.You can easily install Beamer and enable push notifications for your most important updates and have an additional resource to bring back customers to your site.

These days, visitors expect engaging features, options, and new content. Adding a newsfeed widget to your site can help you engage with new visitors, get them exploring your site, and keep them coming back for more. Install Beamer on your site and give users a place to explore updates on every page of your site.