SocialGO Owners

Good day, SocialGO Networkers!

We’re ecstatic to announce that you have more ways than ever to handle your subscriptions with the new Member Billing 2.0! Combined with using your Member Levels, you now have the ability to charge people to access premium areas of your site, like your Videos tab. This is a superb way to generate serious revenue and to up sell your members from a Free plan to a paid one. Amazingly, the new system supports free trials, so you can easily offer motivation for people to ‘try it before they buy it’, and it also supports multiple billing providers and accepts more forms of currency than ever before.

First, if you haven’t defined your member levels already, you will need to go to the Member Manager section and do this. You are free to create an unlimited number of levels and to name them whatever you wish. In this example, we’ve used 2 levels - ‘Free’ and ‘Paid’. For instructions on how to create your member levels, please click here.

If you already have Member Billing, you will need to click the 'Upgrade' button in your 'Membership Billing' area.

Now choose the payment details for the 'Paid' level of membership - in this example, we've created a $10.00 monthly fee and added a 30 day free trial. If you were to choose 'Private' for any level, this will ensure the level/plan is unavailable during sign-up and can only be offered and assigned by the network owner manually.

Now you should assign the member levels to the tabs and pages of your network. In this example, we've restricted the access of the Photos tab to 'Paid' members only. You can allow any number of levels to access a tab.

You will see below the results of what is seen during the sign-up process.
Note the paid subscription has '(30 days trial)' beside it to reflect the trial period. We will soon update the text to '30 Days Free Trial' to avoid any confusion.

Videos tab - currently, the system will limit access to the tab but not to the actual video. You will need to disable the Members tab to prevent the viewing of videos to levels that should not have access to them. This is a temporary measure as it will be possible to limit the Video tab's content, without sacrificing another tab, in approximately 2 weeks.

If you have any questions or feedback, as always, let us know by emailing support@socialgo.com.

Now that a vibrant community of professional suppliers has grown around SocialGO we plan to launch the SocialGO Pro Service Directory in the very near future. 

The purpose is to connect network owners who have a need with professional suppliers who can solve that need.  The listing will be FREE for pprofessional suppliers that want to list and FREE for network owners to access. 

You can expect to see professional suppliers offering services such as custom development, network moderation, network marketing, affiliate programmes, content management, custom design etc.

The SocialGO Pro Services Directory will initially be found in the Admin Centre of every network next to the Theme Store Tab.  Later it will also be features on SocialGO.com.

If you woud like to list your company or service in the Pro Services Directory, we would be happy to hear from you.  Please email niall@socialgo.com.

The genius folk at Widget Laboratory are really turning them out - professional and highly functional widgets that add power and steam to your networks.

The newest widgets include TabDoctor, FootDoctor, LabAffiliate, and LabArcade V2. Click the photo icons to be taken to a video example.

If you have ever wanted to purchase a plan and make your payments via PayPal, now you can - we've added PayPal as an accepted form of payment. Feel free to update your payment information via your Admin Center or to use the PayPal option to upgrade your plan!

Hi guys, 

We have pushed an update today to SocialGO networks and as always ask you guys to check your networks and let us know if you spot anything. 

You will notice that you now get Notifications from activity within your groups so you can stay up date with activity in the corners of your network. We want feedback on this change and will make optimizations in the coming weeks.

We are readying Profile Designer, Twitter login, GoCart and  Member Billing V2 as well so stand by for those coming very soon. 

Looking forward to your feedback! 

Want to learn more about our Concierge plan, the ultimate plan where we do the work for you and offer personalized support? Then join Will & Alex on Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 5:00 p.m. GMT (12:00 p.m. EST, 9:00 a.m. PDT) for a live demonstration of this fantastic, increasingly popular plan.

If you would like to reserve a space in this workshop, please email support@socialgo.com. If you would like to receive information on upcoming workshops, please click this link and enter the required details.

We look forward to seeing you there and answering any questions you have relevant to the topic!

We are readying a major release of SocialGO due out very soon. This features a number of major under-the-hood improvements and 3 great new widgets. 

Notifications will be updated to give you alerts when  there is activity on your profile, in your groups and in your events. This includes those groups and events which you have joined rather than just those which you have created. No more activity in groups which you don't find out about for weeks! 

Some areas of SocialGO have not always been the snappiest and we are addressing this with faster widgets, photo, video and profile browsing and also messaging. 

We are releasing three widgets at the same time, including the previously announced GOCart, a Profile Designer allowing your members to design their pages and also a Twitter Connect widget allowing your members to login to your network using their twitter credentials. 

Other developers are busy readying new themes and a bunch of other undisclosed widgets which will be announced only when they are in our hands.... 

Finally the second part of the Member Billing overhaul will be complete allowing you to match up Member Levels (announced last week) and Billing Plans so you can charge for access to the best parts of your network. This will support free trials and multiple billing providers. 

We are very excited about the next couple of months here at SocialGO and can't wait to share these great new toys with you and your members. 

Thanks for all your support :)  



We are currently working on GOCart, a new shopping cart integration with BuyItSellIt.com. If you are interested in trying it out and setting up a full eCommerce shop on your network, send us a message via Twitter.

The team has been super busy working on backend upgrades and modifications including implementing Zuora to manage the business side of the SocialGO platform. Now that this is complete, the development team can swing onto making great features for your networks. This week is the first of many new-feature releases which we will be bringing you over the next 2 months.

FEATURED GROUPS

So perhaps you have 200 groups on your network but you want to give some of them the spotlight? Well now you can with Featured Groups. Simply head over to a groups profile (as an administrator) and hit the new Feature Group button.

Then simply go and drag the featured groups widget to the top of the groups list and your done!

VIDEOS IN GROUPS

A long-time requested feature is the ability to add videos to your groups. Again, you will need to drag the widget into your Group Profiles, but once that is done, your member will be able to upload videos galore to your group profiles. Simple!

MEMBER LEVELS + NEW MEMBER MANAGER

The Member Manager has been updated to allow sorting by column headings, better searching and easier navigation. In addition you will also find a new sub-tab called Member Levels.

In here you will be able to define sub-sets of members who have access to specific tabs, specific content and certain features.

When you edit a Tab's settings you will now be able to choose which member Levels can access it. If you leave them all unticked, anyone will have access.

We will soon be hooking this into our MEMBER BILLING system so that you can charge people to access premium areas of your site. This will be a fantastic way of generating serious revenue from your network by upselling your members from a free account to a paid account. We will also be introducing support for ClickAndBuy.com and revamping our PayPal support to give all network owners the opportunity to build profitable networks on SocialGO.

And finally.....

SocialGO is also working on some in-house widgets including an integration pack for BuyItSellIt.com, probably one of the best shopping carts around and a range of other heavily requested features which we will be getting out the door in the coming weeks.

The Lab is also producing new and exciting widgets and we have 30+ new and improved themes coming to the Theme store.

I am excited and i hope you are too! As always we are here to help at support@socialgo.com. We will be doing a Workshop today on these new features if you want to come and take a look or if you have any questions.

Cheers!