We’ve launched Spike’s new heads-up display, a specially designed interface that highlights the most important stories of the day, in high definition.Â
Today, we’re excited to launch Spike’s new Heads-Up Display, which is now available to all users. The display allows social media teams, content marketers, and newsrooms to stay aware of the most important stories in their space, at a glance.
Just like Spike, the new feature ranks the biggest stories of the hour, day, week, or month – but in a new interface specially designed for larger viewing. The display also shows important social data points for individual stories, including tweet and Facebook interaction counts.
To see what’s trending, just look up.
 The display brings high definition quality to social analytics and discovery. Its clean design gives the most important stories prominence and clarity, while showing the key numbers around each piece. Granular breakdowns of social interactions on individual stories also feature, with detailed charts showing share, comment, tweet counts and more for individual hits, and graphs illustrating the speed at which each story is being shared.
The display is based on the panels that users create within Spike. Panels tracking particular brands, industry news, and influential blogs in your space will show up relevant stories in each vertical, so the more detailed your panel, the more information that the slides on the HUD show.
Publishers can also set up their display to show their biggest stories by network, and keep an eye on what the competition’s numbers are looking like.
It’s also a great way of illustrating the long-term performance of your content over a longer time range. Simply set up a panel for your own site and see how your stories were shared, commented and spread over days or weeks. This helps further improve the social awareness that Spike brings to leading newsrooms and content hubs – the type the USA Today editor Holly Moore says allows her team to ‘lead with their guns’ on their social media channels.
To access, log into Spike, and either create or open a content panel. After saving all changes (you can add specific publishers, include search terms, sort by different metrics and time ranges, and lots more), simply click the icon in the top right of your screen.
The display opens in a new screen, showing the latest trending stories from the categories you’ve selected. You’ll see the biggest stories from each panel, arranged side-by-side. After displaying key information, the screen flicks between panels, then focuses on the biggest individual story in each niche.
There you’ll get more granular detail on share counts and rate of sharing. The display loops through the different elements, making sure that the biggest stories of the day are never too far away.
Hook up the display to a widescreen monitor, or use a projector to properly illustrate what stories matter in your space today. You’ll never miss a trending story again – just remember to look up.
We’d love to hear some feedback on how you use this new feature in your work, so feel free to drop us an email with any comments.
