Better Than Facebook: Stream Newsfeed & Communication Channel for Coworking Spaces

Nobody will deny the significance of communication at a coworking space. This is the essence of the coworking space culture. Most of your members come to your center to get not only an affordable workplace but networking, support, and collaboration required for faster business growth.

I am sure you organize various events at your coworking space. They evidently help to build the community but members need to know about all these events somehow as well as get updates on workspace news. You can easily connect all your members with the powerful Stream newsfeed & communication tool offered by andcards coworking space management software.

Read on and get to know what differentiates Stream from other messengers, what can you use it for, what makes it great for your members, and more.

 

What is Stream

Before digging deeper into the topic, let's identify what is Stream and what it does.

Stream is an advanced andcards technology solution built into the main app that provides enterprise-grade coworking space community feed where members can communicate. Stream allows to:

• Share status updates in real time.
• Attach photos to posts, embed videos.
• Add hashtags to posts.
• React to posts.
• Receive push notifications for new posts.

Using Stream, you instantly get a scalable activity feed for in-app messaging and communication. Your branded newsfeed and communication tool looks and performs similarly to the popular Twitter, Instagram, Spotify, and Salesforce Chatter platforms making member experience brighter and driving in-app conversion, engagement, and retention.

 

Some of the Stream Community Feed Features Your Members Will Enjoy:

• Comments on posts. Members can not only read the info but leave their feedback, thoughts, and comments to the posts. When some of your posts receive a comment, you get notified about it, which encourages further communication.

• View who liked a post. It's always interesting to know people's reaction to the information you post. Now you have the possibility to know all members that reacted to your post by names to measure engagement.

  

• Upload multiple images of any size, zoom, and swipe. Images draw much more attention than any words. The more images you add to your post, the better you illustrate it and make more appealing for members. Things become even more thrilling when readers can interact with images you publish, for instance, zoom them to see small details.
• Embed videos. If images capture more eyeballs to your posts, videos make members stop and stare. By publishing video content, you make residents spend more time on the page by evoking their interest and emotions.
• Add hashtags. Hashtags make your publications more searchable, organized, and categorized. When a member clicks on a highlighted hashtag, all posts with the relevant hashtag will be served and displayed immediately. Just like on Twitter, Instagram, or any other social network.
• Add emoji. These small ideograms and smileys will make your messages more fun, friendly, and expressive. 😋 🤗 😉 Add them to your posts to share your mood with community members.
• Edit posts. All of us make mistakes or the info may change after you click the "Post" button. It's such a relief when you can fix and improve your posts easily. This is an easy way to keep your Stream posts up-to-date and error-free.
• Cross-post from Stream into other communication channels and vice versa. Some of your posts require special publicity. You don't need to create and publish a separate post for each platform. Use the cross-posting Stream feature that involves Zapier and save yourself some time while keeping members well-informed.

 

How to Enable Stream at Your Coworking Space

Stream community newsfeed is available inside your andcards workspace app right out-of-the-box. Just enable Stream in workspace settings with a flip of a switch and you’ll see a new “Stream” page on the main screen of your app. Make sure to write a welcome post for your community members, to kickstart communication with your community the moment they activate accounts.

 

What Makes Stream Better than Facebook Group, Slack, or WhatsApp Chat?

A lot of coworking spaces don't care much about the community feed and chat as there are so many free messaging platforms out there. They just start to use Twitter or Facebook to communicate with members.

While it may seem a good solution for you, neither Facebook nor Twitter helps in creating a solid coworking brand and its promotion. Think about that: consistency is the key to building a brand image. I mean everything your members see and interact with must reflect your corporate style and convey a brand idea.

For that reason, you opt for white-label coworking space management software. If you want your members to use a branded coworking app, it's natural that the same logic should be applied to the tool for internal communication.

 

Here are a few solid arguments in favor of branded community feed and chat application.

• A branded community feed and chat tool facilitates members retention.

  According to Mailchimp a good marketing principle to keep in mind is that most people need to hear your message seven times before they decide to buy your product or service.

  This also applies to remarketing and retaining your customers. So, if you want customers to stay longer, and return to your coworking space, you need to ensure they hear about you at least seven times, preferably from different sources. This is where Stream comes in. It is a new valuable communication touchpoint with your customers in contrast to messengers like Twitter, Facebook, Slack, and WhatsApp that have nothing to do with your coworking brand.

• Stream improves the visibility of your messages. Your existing customers (residents) are more likely to notice your communication because it comes from your branded app, which features your coworking space logo and name. This happens because your customers are loyal to your coworking brand, so they are likely to trust it more than any other messenger (Facebook, Twitter.)
• One more reason why your Stream messages are easier to notice for coworking space members. Just think about how many messengers a modern entrepreneur uses for business communication. They get hundreds of notifications from WhatsApp, Gmail, Facebook, Telegram, etc. per day. But from your app, they get only a few, so they will surely notice it.
• Having a community chat tool integrated with your coworking space app gives members one more reason to download and open your app on their smartphones more often, increasing technology adoption and ultimately creating more chances to discover other services you offer: membership benefits, meeting rooms.

 

Some Ideas of Using Stream to Your Coworking Space Benefit

There are many use cases of powerful Stream feed tool. Here is a kind of checklist for you to make sure that you didn't miss anything.

• Share schedule changes or updates. Sometimes you close your workplace on a weekend for construction or the internet upgrade to a faster router. Or maybe the coworking area will be closed for a private event after six. Let members know so they don't come and be disappointed.
• Share ad-hoc events. Sometimes a coworker brings donuts or an apple pie to share with everyone. Invite members to the reception or the kitchen for a treat.
• Lost and found. Someone forgot an item, snap a photo and ask the community if they know who lost it.
• Survey your members to know what they think. Create a simple Typeform survey and share it with your community. You can get instant answers to improve your customer experience.
• Ask community members a question. Preferably something a lot of residents are potentially interested in. When you'll start to get the first answers and maybe even see the discussions, fuel the conversation and respond to involve more members in the communication.
• Ask members to leave a review on Google Maps or your Facebook page. Reviews are an important point of consideration for your prospective customers. There is nobody better to leave a review than existing customers who already experienced your hospitality.
• Just share some love. Tell your coworkers how much you value them. Share an emotional picture. Make them feel something.

 

Important Things to Make Stream Great

Just like with every other means of promotion, you should use Stream wisely to preserve its initial value for members. Here are some guidelines to do it.

• Curate the Stream, make sure the content is useful to recipients. Useful content will decrease the chances that members turn off annoying push notifications.
• Don't post the same content as on Facebook or Twitter. Post something only for members, and something your residents can only read on the app. This will help you improve the user activation rate because it gives a clear motivation to download the coworking app.
• Post regularly. Keeping in touch with customers should be consistent and regular. But not too frequent or it'll get annoying for members.
• Don't post too often.

 

Conclusion

Seems like that's it for now. This article covered many aspects of using andcards Stream newsfeed and communication tool. Hope now you have a fresh view on why having your branded messaging app is more beneficial than using popular platforms—WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, and others.

Do you want to implement the solution at your flexible workspace? Schedule a free demo call with us to know what else we can do to improve members' experience at your coworking center.