Introducing Supergroup Channel and Advanced Analytics for Sendbird Chat

It’s with great pleasure that Sendbird partners with some of the most innovative brands in the social and online community space. Because they’re working with users to develop the most rewarding large-scale experiences on the internet, we have the opportunity to match their innovation with our own. Together we can push chat to its most creative solutions.

So we’re excited to announce a suite of new experiences and features that focus on a scale fit for the internet – massive:

• Supergroup Channels for Sendbird Chat for tens of thousands of users in a private group channel
• “Smart Push” to manage your push notification engagement strategy for Supergroup Channels
• Advanced Analytics to leverage big data into insights that deliver impact for your chat
• Dynamic Partitioning to give users the experience of large-scale open channels without overwhelming the chat stream

Supergroup Channel for Sendbird Chat: The only group chat big enough for the Internet

Sendbird customers lead innovation in private group chat

In the past, large online communities typically engaged by exchanging thoughts and perspectives in feeds and forums. Today, the nature of engagement has changed. Time and again, we see that users want to engage with one another through real-time chat—like they do with their friends and families in modern messenger applications—but at the scale of thousands of users like in a typical online community. The challenge was to provide large-scale, members-based communities with the intimacy and immediacy of messenger applications.

Sendbird’s community customers like Reddit and Dream11 were innovators of this trend and understood that their community wanted to chat privately in large groups (thousands of members) so users could connect over shared interests and engage with one another through real-time chat. Load managing the backend infrastructure and bringing the full-featured chat experience for private groups of a couple hundred of users is a complex problem in itself.

Yet, our innovative community customers wanted to push the limits of group chat to accommodate the need validated by user behavior. They wanted to extend the full-featured private group chat experience not simply to hundreds, but to tens of thousands of users. So we took note and got to work.

Chat supergroups gather tens of thousands of users in a private channel

Today, we’re very excited to announce the launch of Supergroups for Sendbird Chat. Supergroups are a new, powerful group channel in Sendbird Chat - one that can power private group chats for tens of thousands of users in a single group.

Large community chat powered by Supergroup Channel

Popular community sites such as Reddit and Dream11 use Supergroups to power real-time engagement between thousands of members in private community chat threads.

Supergroups are being used as a destination for thousands of users to share, have fun, and seek advice and tips on a topic from influencers and experts in an exclusive large community. Gaming communities, for example, are using Supergroups to find players and exchange ideas or strategies to advance gameplay privately.

Supergroups support many standard group chat features that drive user engagement, including features like

• Sharing media and file messages
• Online presence indicators
• Displaying the last message
• Message unread counts for up to 100 unread messages
• Operators to manage or moderate the community
• Displaying the member list
• @mention channel
• Mention counts
• And others …

Supergroup Channel in large sports community mobile app

Supergroups also support channel management and moderation features essential for community moderation such as:

• freeze channel
• ban user
• mute user
• spam flood protection and many more

With all the standard features at the Supergroup scale, private group chat has never been more dynamic and engaging for online and app communities.

“Smart Push” for Supergroup Chats: Real-time engagement built for communities

For our customers, push notifications are a big part of their chat engagement strategy. Push notifications for Supergroups, where tens of thousands of users chat, require entirely reimagining push notifications. We’re excited to match customer innovation with innovation, so we’re proud to introduce the “Smart Push” feature for Supergroup chats.

In general, for Supergroups, Sendbird handles push notifications by the size of the group:

• Groups with members less than or equal to 100
• Groups with members greater than 100

For groups with sizes 100 members or less, Supergroups simply sends a push notification for every message sent.

For groups with sizes greater than 100 members, customers can choose to send push notifications to users using two options:

1. Send a push notification every 10 minutes, if the group receives a message within that 10-minute window
2. Smart Push - a new kind of push notification for Supergroup Channels

Chat supergroup Channel in Sendbird Dashboard

Smart Push only sends a push notification to active users. Sendbird considers a user active if the user entered the channel to read a message within the last 60 seconds. With Smart Push, notifications only reach users when it is timely and relevant to them without inundating them with notifications. At the same time, Smart Push actively engages those users most recently interested in the conversation. With push notifications handled, Supergroups power large scale conversations and complement your engagement strategy, while maintaining a satisfying user experience by intelligently relaying the most important push notifications.

The internet is a big place. And checking message boards and threads has always been asynchronous. Now, Supergroups are truly meant for communities wanting to drive real-time engagement at the scale of the internet.

Supergroups is available in Sendbird Chat API and SDKs for iOS, Android and Javascript; and is also available in the Sendbird UIKit.

Advanced Chat Analytics: Better insights to create better experiences

Product, Growth, UX, and other teams all depend on high-quality user data to drive the biggest impact and most innovative experiments. Now, Sendbird delivers rich data on user chat behavior with Advanced Analytics for Sendbird Chat.

Advanced Analytics provides deeper insight into users, messages, and channels, which helps our customers analyze and understand user behavior in their Sendbird Chat application.

Advanced Analytics lets customers track user behavior across nine metrics, these are:

• Messages
• Messages per user
• New channels
• Active channels
• Message senders
• Message viewers
• New users
• Deactivated users
• Deleted users

Advanced Analytics for Sendbird Chat

Advanced analytics offers immediate access to metrics aggregated from your application since launch, enabling relevant and pragmatic insights to drive decisions, impact, and product or UX experimentation.

Advanced Analytics can be accessed both via the Sendbird Chat Platform API and the Sendbird Dashboard.

Sneak Peek: Dynamic partitioning for chat Open Channels

If you didn’t think Supergroup Channels and Advanced Analytics for Sendbird chat was innovative enough, we also wanted to give you a sneak peek into the new frontier for powering large group chats, which is on the horizon in the next few weeks.

Planned for release in the coming weeks is Dynamic Partitioning for open channels. Dynamic Partitioning continuously and programmatically splits large open channel chats into virtual groups of smaller sizes.

The advantage is a great open channel experience for participants: users continue to feel as if they are part of a large open channel chat; however, in reality, users are split into smaller virtual open channels, which creates a more manageable user experience. That means better message loading speeds, which would otherwise overwhelm users and make messages unreadable.

Dynamic Partitioning works in the background and has tremendous effects on ensuring a pleasant messaging experience at scale in live-streaming group chats. We can’t wait to release it to the community.

Real-time chat engagement at scale

Thanks to our customers, who are at the forefront of chat at a massive scale and insightful user data, we’re releasing Supergroup Channels, Advanced Analytics, and Dynamic Partitioning to meet the innovative needs of their users. Whether they’re a community, live streaming platform, healthcare, on-demand, or marketplace app, we’re excited to support customers as they continue to connect users, learn from their behavior, and create real-time engagement at scale.

To start using Supergroup Channels in Sendbird Chat, and Advanced Analytics visit the docs or get started with a free trial. If you already use Sendbird, you can enable the feature on your Sendbird Dashboard.

As always, please let us know if you have any questions or feedback - we’d love to hear from you.