Stream enables thousands of companies, from small startups to enterprise corporations, to easily integrate chat and activity feed functionality into their software products.
Increased engagement, improved user experience, and elevated app stickiness are just several of the many benefits app owners reap with the Stream Activity Feed and Chat APIs.
Here’s what customers are saying about building best-in-class apps with Stream’s components, and how APIs are enabling improved app communities, scale, and performance.
Powering In-App Communities
End-users of the Stream Chat API can connect with each other without having to exit an app or give out their personal information such as phone numbers or email addresses. This functionality enables user communities to flourish in a safe environment, and create meaningful connections.
Benzinga Pro is a platform designed to give individual investors real-time access to trading information. To stand out from the competition, Benzinga aimed to build a community of established and novice traders alike to discuss trading ideas and tactics. The Stream Chat API powers in-app messaging for members of Benzinga’s community, making for engaged and satisfied users.
Scale with Confidence
Having your dev team build a bare-bones chat or feed may work for an MVP or a small project. But such functionality is tough to build and maintain — especially when you start adding features such as personalization and fan-out. In chat, maintaining low-latency connections when your app starts to acquire thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of users quickly becomes complicated, and necessitates significant knowledge and resources.
As CodePen, a social community for front-end designers, added more users, the platform recognized the opportunity to add and expand their activity feed functionality into personalized content recommendations. After evaluating options, it was clear that a third-party component solution would provide more advanced features at a significantly lower cost than in-house development.
Boost User Engagement
There’s a reason nearly all social media apps contain either an activity feed, in-app chat, or both. Such functionality is essential for users to communicate and connect with each other, and to ensure that new and exciting content is consistently available for discovery. Consequently, apps that contain in-app messaging and activity feeds typically enjoy greater user engagement metrics, such as time spent in-app, session intervals, user retention rates, and daily, weekly, and monthly active users.
Survey data shows that after integrating the Stream Activity Feed API into their app, Stream customers saw user engagement increase by an average of 66%, and user retention increase by 58%.
After integrating Stream’s activity feed into Crunchbase’s subscription product, for example, Group Product Manager Martin Guelck saw skyrocketed engagement among the platform’s core user base of salespeople.
Support for Success
Having a dedicated customer success team to help guide you through API integration and optimization is a major perk of choosing a third-party component provider versus building chat or feed functionality in house. Stream’s team of CS professionals can help answer your integration questions — ranging from importing your data to enhancing the activity feed user experience with personalization features.
When Dare Olatoye, co-founder of the Nigerian dating app Trueflutter, had chat integration questions, he enlisted the help of Stream’s customer service team to add a high-performing chat experience into his rapidly growing app.
Faster & Easier Than In-House Builds
In early 2020, when most in-person conferences, trade shows, and concerts transitioned to online venues, virtual event platforms had to innovate — and fast. Existing digital event websites and newly launched platforms alike embraced sophisticated communication tools to boost attendee participation.
Welcome, founded in May 2020, sought to build an experience-first virtual event platform that could function as “the Ritz-Carlton of online events,” says Tiger Shen, Welcome’s co-founder and CTO. Shen required a feature-rich chat functionality that could maintain messaging performance as the company scaled. And he needed it as quickly as possible to serve the many events scrambling to connect professionals online.
Learn More About Stream APIs
We’re proud to provide chat and activity feed functionality for over a billion end users. If you are interested in learning more about integrating Stream into your platform, schedule a meeting to talk with sales.
