{"id":7192,"date":"2018-01-05T11:54:58","date_gmt":"2018-01-05T11:54:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gosquared.com\/blog\/?p=7192"},"modified":"2019-11-28T11:09:51","modified_gmt":"2019-11-28T11:09:51","slug":"how-to-announce-new-features","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gosquared.com\/blog\/how-to-announce-new-features","title":{"rendered":"How and when to announce new features"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Announcing<\/p>\n

It\u2019s exciting when you ship a new feature \u2013 you\u2019ve been working with your teammates for weeks and sweating the details and you just can\u2019t wait to hit that \u201cdeploy\u201d button and get it into the wild.<\/p>\n

But all too often we get so excited to release something we don\u2019t stop to ask if anyone\u2019s going to notice.<\/p>\n

For a long time, we would announce features all over the place, with only a GitHub commit message and a Tweet here or there to keep track of anything \u2013 hardly a great way to do our work justice.<\/p>\n

These days, we have a bunch of different channels where we announce updates. Depending on the significance of the announcement, we\u2019ll decide which channels to use when we push out our message.<\/p>\n

The different channels for announcing a new feature or release<\/h2>\n

A: In an announcements tab inside your product<\/h3>\n

We added an Announcements feed<\/a> into the platform years ago, inspired a by a talk from Kevin Hale<\/a>, the founder of Wufoo.<\/p>\n

We aim to announce everything \u2013 even if it\u2019s a fairly small change \u2013 in the Announcements tab<\/a> so it\u2019s the definitive history of changes to the platform.<\/p>\n

Our Announcements feed isn\u2019t very intrusive on your usage of GoSquared, so making lots of smaller announcements here ensures we don\u2019t frustrate our customers with a bombardment of pings and attention-grabbing banners every day.<\/p>\n

We built our Announcements feed internally but these days there are off-the-shelf options out there \u2013 check out Headway<\/a> as a really slick and affordable option that we\u2019ve seen popping up a lot lately.<\/p>\n

B: On social media<\/h3>\n

A lot of our customer base (and future customer base) hangs out on social media, so we try to ensure we share updates as often as we can on our favourite social sites.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve found that sharing a brief sentence of the update along with an image or GIF of the feature in action is the most effective way to communicate a release in this way.<\/p>\n

The other thing to bear in mind with social media \u2013 even if you have thousands of followers, the chance of even 20% of them seeing your post is low.<\/p>\n

Everyone has their own style, but we\u2019ve found over time that sharing more updates more frequently, and sharing the same update in a number of different ways, is a tactic for gaining a little more attention from your same audience.<\/p>\n

C: Email or in-app Broadcast message<\/h3>\n

If you have something that is so important you need to make sure customers see it, there\u2019s still no better way than sending an email or an in-app message.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unlikely you\u2019ll want to send an email to your entire customer base, so thankfully there are tools out there (GoSquared included!) that can help you segment your list of users and customers to just those who need to know about the release.<\/p>\n

A benefit of using an in-app Broadcast is you can inform customers of a release when they\u2019re in your product, rather than sending an email when they may be disengaged, out to lunch, or sleeping.<\/p>\n

D: Blog post<\/h3>\n

Blog posts are great for announcing bigger features that require some explanation or have a story behind them.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not for us to tell you how to write, but something we\u2019ve found to be increasingly successful is diving into the background on how a feature came to exist, and sharing details of the design and development process.<\/p>\n

In the same way people love to watch Apple\u2019s videos on how they chisel a MacBook out of a block of aluminium, people like to know the craft that goes into the software they use.<\/p>\n

E: External press<\/h3>\n

For a really significant release \u2013 something we feel is changing the trajectory of our company \u2013 we want to gain as much exposure as possible, so that means going outside our normal circles.<\/p>\n

For getting others to cover your story, there are many tactics and whole articles of advice on how to do just this. But here are just a few nuggets of wisdom we\u2019ve picked up along the way:<\/p>\n