In the technology and mobile app worlds, buzzy new strategies and tactics come and go almost daily. They move with such velocity, once they fade it can be difficult to recall exactly what all the fuss was about in the first place. But not every new approach is bound to disappear as quickly as it emerged. Some endure.

Research has shown that 21% of newly downloaded apps are abandoned after just one use. If you manage, build, or have founded an app, driving engagement is always on trend and leads to growth, revenue, and, ultimately, profitability. 

One tech leader who has been unusually successful at fostering engagement is Abdel Hosen, head of development at Fruitlab, a gaming community platform. 

About FruitLab

Fruitlab is a social platform that brings together gamers, content creators, and developers in the online gaming space. It brings the Play-to-Earn model to games, eSsports, and social content to redefine the gaming ecosystem by integrating eSsports and social together and powering it with their own cryptocurrency, the PIP.

How FruitLab Uses CometChat to Drive Engagement: 

1. Build with engagement in mind

Since its launch in 2019, FruitLab recognized that community and community engagement would be critical to its success. The team built a platform with communication at its core.

“Chat has always been very visible on the site,” Hosen said. “It was part of the whole UI and integrated with the website itself. It’s not just a widget at the bottom right-hand corner where you have to click to open it. We put it in our main menu so you could easily get to it … We didn’t want anyone to mistake it for, like, a help center.”

2. Get creative

While user-to-user chat naturally drives engagement, Hosen and team also developed creative initiatives that made it easy for users to interact.

“We talk to users regularly and do competitions within the chat,” he said. “We even have a group chat called Quiz, where users will go once, twice a week when we run a quiz. That really gets users engaged.”

3. Keep interactions positive and safe

With a prominent chat feature throughout the site that attracts a broad range of users, FruitLab realized that chat moderation was key to a positive user experience and an engaged community.

From the beginning they began implementing features to protect the community: a profanity filter, functions to report and block users, and more.

“We can give a user more power as a moderator - they get a badge next to their name,” said Hosen. “And what that allows them to do you have more control - ban people, block people, delete messages, and so on.

Sky-high User Growth Is Great, but True Engagement Has Other Rewards  

A number of metrics exist to measure user engagement — time on site, number of user-to-user connections, return visits, user growth, and more. FruitLab has been so successful in improving these quantifiable measures of engagement, they intentionally paused user acquisition in 2020 to build the infrastructure that could handle the 1 million concurrent connections they were rapidly approaching.

Chat, of course, is key to improving these metrics. “Why chat” Hosen said, “It gets your user to stay longer on the site. It’ll keep them in the session longer.”

While metrics are nice, the tangible benefits of a very engaged community are even more compelling.

“We hardly use email to communicate with our users,” Hosen said. “We just hop on the chat. The community helps each other. We don’t have to do all the work ourselves, one of our users answers almost any question another user posts”

A new platform, why choose CometChat a second time?

Despite the ongoing success of FruitLab, Hosen has added a new business to his stable, Racing Factors, a horse racing platform with community at its core. 

With the opportunity to use lessons learned at FruitLab and start with a clean slate, Hosen is again using CometChat to drive community and engagement. 

“Building chat is a costly thing,” he said. “I can't see the point of building a new chat system. It’s a business in itself, upgrades and all of that. It’s just not possible to sustain the costs.

“We want to focus on our core in terms of who we are,” Hosen said. “I mean, we're a gaming platform. Using a third-party is the right choice.”

With the opportunity to start fresh with a new venture, did Hosen consider other chat providers? 

In a word, no. 

“CometChat, first of all, provides great value,” Hosen said. But more than value, “what impressed us is the customer service and tech support. Any time we had a problem the CometChat team would sort it out straight away for us. The tech support and customer service is excellent.” 

Beyond experience with CometChat, great technical support when needed, and value, the product is outstanding. 

“I can see the CometChat platform keeps getting better and better,” Hosen said.

“We built a lot of features with CometChat’s help, obviously,” Hosen said. “We had regular conversations with the CometChat team, and CometChat really went to the extreme to help us build things, which was very helpful.”

Chat With Us!

Connect with the CometChat team to see how we can help quickly implement in-app messaging, and voice & video calling on your website or app: www.cometchat.com/contact.

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