Visitors may come to your site to read a post, but how are they supposed to stay if they cannot find more interesting content. Visual content discovery is a new approach to letting users discover more of your blog posts.
Vecgraph (https://www.vecgraph.com/) is working on interactive content maps for a fresh new alternative to content discovery. In a content map, each post is represented by a node (circle) and a relationship by an edge (arrow). You can also look at this blogs content at https://explore.vecgraph.com/latest-techtips
Chances are your blog has a related content widget. Or maybe a popular posts widget? However, in a world striving for your reader's attention, you might need to go the extra mile to help them find more interesting posts. Here are the top benefits of taking a visual approach to content discovery:
Reader Engagement:
There are countless widgets for trending, recommended, or related posts. While these widgets do provide a way for readers to find more posts, these widgets do not give your users a way to explore your content for themselves. These widgets are limited to predicting what may interest the user. Hence the algorithms that power these widgets take control away from the user and only show a very narrow selection of what your site has to offer.
Let's say one of your readers found a post on an interesting topic they would like to investigate further. By representing the relations between your posts visually you can help your reader investigate the topic further by giving them a visual overview of posts related to that topic. Furthermore, readers can also explore how each of those posts is related to each other. This gives your readers an interactive way to explore a topic and discover more of your posts.
Give control back to the reader:
A content map is a visual representation of your posts. By representing each post as a node and the relations as edges it highlights how each of the posts relates to one another. It allows the reader to explore a topic of interest for themselves, instead of being spoonfed a sample of potentially interesting articles. While machine learning algorithms can predict what posts might interest a reader based on their previous interests, they are a black box in the sense that the reader does not always know why they are being recommended something. Since a content map is interactive your audience can have a sense of control when they are finding more relevant posts.
Increase your pageviews:
When a user comes to your site to read an interesting post it is your job to help them find more of your content. A visual content map provides a fresh new alternative to the endless feeds and widgets users encounter on most blogs. By giving your users an exciting way to explore your posts you increase your chances of getting another page view.
Bring your archives to life:
As a blogger, you may be posting often to keep your audiences engaged with your site. Once these posts get older they get archived away. Once this happens it becomes hard for a user to discover this content unless it is picked up and presented in a widget by some recommendation algorithm. A visual content map can bring your archives to life by creating an interactive experience. Readers can explore and discover more helpful posts related to a topic after reading a post.
Content discovery is a challenging problem. Predicting what interests a user might result in more views, but giving your user a tool to explore your content will help your blog stand out in a monotonous world of feeds and widgets. In the long run, this will help increase page views and boost user engagement.
Authour Bio information:
Marko Arezina
I am a passionate programmer, with an interest in graphs and artificial intelligence. I am currently working at Vecgraph to improve content discovery. I also love tennis and jogging.
