Activities and groups (Channels) are essential components to structure your community. They can be managed in the backend (or Back office) by going to the Channels section.

Types of channels

• Home: The main landing page and top channel, providing key info and navigation.

• Feed: A default channel displaying updates and posts in chronological order.
• Gallery: A visual channel for displaying product images, requiring a product catalog.

• Post Feed: Classic and highly customizable forum format (Facebook)

• Routine: Ask your members to describe their Routine and tag products (Product catalog needed)

• Product pairing: Ask members to pair products together (Product catalog needed)

• Blog: Highly customizable and engaging posts. Mainly dedicated to brands’ collaborators for qualitative awareness or members for developed product feedback.

• Chatroom: Public instant messaging

• Contest: Gather all contests (current and past)

• Product Testing: Members to follow up on product testing processes

• Events: Online or on-site events through video. We host the Event, and the link redirects to a video platform (Zoom, Teams, etc)

• Survey: Display survey to the community. One Survey channel can host one survey at a time. If you want 2 surveys at the same time, just create a new Survey channel. We are integrated with Typeform.

• Moderation: moderate your community content and members. Dedicated to community managers (private channel)

• Question: Display questions asked by visitors on your e-commerce website (Community Chat needed)

• Category Feed: Display all posts tagged with a specific category

• Custom Page: Create the informative page you want (T&Cs, Community guidelines, FAQs…)

Know more about each channel type

Channels are essential tools for interacting with your community. Each type of channel serves a unique purpose, whether you're sharing information, gathering feedback, or fostering discussions. Below, we've categorized the different types of channels you can create and manage, with links to detailed guides for each.

Informative Channels

• How to: Create and manage Blog channels
• How to: Create and manage Product-related channels

These channels focus on sharing updates, articles, or product information with your community. They are ideal for delivering content and keeping your audience informed.

Engagement Channels

• How to: Create and manage Contest, Moderation & Question channels
• How to: Create and manage Survey & Event Channels

These channels are designed to encourage participation, whether through contests, discussions, or feedback collection. They help maintain active community engagement.

Visual and Interactive Channels

• How to: Create and manage Gallery, Post Feed, & Category Feed channels

For sharing images, posts, and curated content, these channels offer a more interactive experience, allowing your community to engage visually and respond to curated feeds.

General Settings

1. Log into your admin account 
2. Go to the "Config" tab, then channels on the top left of the page
3. Click on add channel on the top right of the page
4. Choose the channel type from the menu
5. Add your Channel information

   Title: Be concise to fit in the menu
   Channel icon: add an image to be displayed before the title
   Subtitle: it’s the channel description. Be as detailed as possible. Guide your members if needed.
   Banners format & size: svg / .png / .jpg | Desktop: 640x200px | Mobile: 360x140px

6. Add the visibility of your channel
   
   Visible: Accessible to all users
   Hidden: Hidden to all users (for deactivation)
   Limited: Restricted to a certain type of users based on their status or role (for exclusive access)
   Link: Accessible upon private access to the link (for testing purposes or exclusive accesses). You need to access the URL once to have permanent access to the channel.

Advanced Settings

1. Interractions
   
   Allow users to update the Meta Title and the Meta Description for SEO: Allow admins (only) to modify Post title and subtitle (description) for Google referencing
   Allow users to subscribe/unsubscribe to this channel : If this entry is checked, members are able to unsubscribe to this channel via the “Manage channels” button activated in the menu.
   Users has to manually subscribe to this channel: Users will have to click on subscribe on the channel to see its content.
   Channel indexable by search robots: Allow search engines like Google to display the channel content in search results.
2. Post/Comment configuration
   
   Post and comment settings control content sharing in a channel, allowing elements like titles, text, and media to be required, optional, or forbidden. Some fields, like photos, can have limits. Custom fields add flexibility after channel creation.
   Like per IP Address allowed (-1 for unlimited) : Can be used to restrict likes per user to avoid cheating behaviors, esp. for competitions based on the number of likes. It’s a rare use case so we advise keeping default settings.
   Flags to auto-moderate: An important moderation feature that deletes posts x amount of flags has been done. You can see flagged posts in the Moderation channel.
   
   
3. Poster configuration
   The poster is the pop-up that your members will fill in in the post creation process. It’s important to ease this process and guide your members in performing the actions you want. Below steps on how to configure your poster.
   
   Choose a header: the general action you want members to do.
   Add a description: guide your members. The longer is the post, the harder it will be for them to post. Add as many concise details as you can.
   Order elements and attachments you chose in the most logical order.
   Divide the posting process into 2+ steps (optional) : The longer the post, the more steps you can add. a. We recommend having 1+ steps for Blog posts, Routines and Product Pairings. 
   
   
4. Filtering & Sorting

   Adding filters and sorting options in your channels can ease community navigation for your members.
   
   Comment presence : show posts with or without comments (ex - in a Q&A type of channel, a filter to see posts without comments could help you increase the response rate)

   Validated: Users are able to filter the platform with validated posts
   Most recent/popular: sort per most recent or most popular posts (total of likes+comments) posts
    
   6. Emails
      If members can manually subscribe and unsubscribe to a channel, you can set up the sending of emails when certain members post to the channel.

      

      👉Select the senders via email address or from member database
      👉Members will receive an immediate notification as soon as the members set above have posted in the channel
      👉If you want to send a digest email in addition to the immediate notification, tick the toggle and make sure that the “MetapostWeeklyDigest” email is activated (see the emails dedicated section). The digest email is sent every Tuesday at 3pm.

Adding Custom Fields to a channel

Custom fields within a channel can help you create categories and options for users when they make a post. For example, you can ask users to provide their location, select from multiple-choice or single-choice options, fill out their social media handles, or add a text field to express their interests on a specific topic

Custom fields can be added on the post configuration an only to those types of channels:

• Gallery
• Blog
• Routine
• Product pairing
• Post Feed

👉 You can add channel custom fields once the channel has been created.

1. On the Admion, go to Config > Channels and click edit on the channel you want to add the custom Fields
   
2. Click on "Posts configuration" on the left menu, then click add on the cutom fields section
   
3. Put the title of you custom field on the "Label" Field and choose from the dropdown menu the type of field special use.
   
   👉 For text fields, users can add their TikTok, Youtube or Instagram handle to their post. For this option, only one custom field with the special use of TikTok is allowed per Brand Category.
   You can select None if you'd like users to provide a text response to a specific question instead.
4. 
5. 
   👉For "Single choice" and "Multiple choice" click on "+ Add a possibility" for every choice you want to add for the users to check
   
   👉 You can enable the "Optional" toggle if the custom field is not required for users to complete before posting.
   👉 If you enable the "Is Readonly" toggle, users will not be able to interact with the field. This is useful when you want the field to be informational only, such as displaying important details users should be aware of before posting.
   👉 The "Rank" field allows you to set the position of each custom field, which is helpful if you have multiple fields and want to control their order.
6. Once you've filled out all the details for your custom field, click "Add this field" to save it.
   
7. Scroll all the way down and click "Update" to save your changes to the channel.

On the channel, users can filter content by custom fields if they want to view posts linked to a specific field. To enable this functionality, make sure to activate the filtering option.

1. Click on "Filtering & Sorting" in the channel's editing page.
2. Activate the toggle "Customfields"
3. Click on update to save your changes on the channel
   
4. On the channle front the filter option will show as below:
   

FAQs

How to reorder the sections and groups in the community menu?

Click and drag the three dots up and down to change the position of the channel on the platform.

How to edit the name and description of a group?

• Go to the Admin section.
• Navigate to the Config section > Channels.
• Select the channel and click on Edit.
• In Channel Information, you can change the title and subtitle of your channel.

👉 Remember to save your changes to keep them.

How to re-open an old channel?

Maybe you’ve created a channel for special events (Easter, International Women’s Day, Christmas, Valentine's Day, etc.) and want to reopen it later.

• Go to See Hidden Channels.
• The dashboard will display all hidden channels (marked with a crossed-eye icon).
• Click on Edit.
• In Channel Information, scroll to "Visible" and select the desired visibility.

Visible: Accessible to all users.
Hidden: Not accessible to any users (for deactivation).
Limited: Restricted to a specific type of users (for exclusive access).
Link: Accessible with a private link (for testing purposes).

👉 Remember to save your changes.