Vocal’s Notifications

I woke up one morning last week and found something very interesting when I checked my Vocal profile. There was a notifications icon right next to my profile picture. I have to say the site of that notification icon brought me a great deal of relief and joy. Every Vocal writer is about to do a lot better on this site for a number of major reasons.

Word Of Mouth

Before this notifications icon was added as a new feature what was the main way we as Vocal writer got the word out about our newest works? Exactly, there was no one key way. Every time we had a new story published there was no major method of letting your subscribers know that you had a new work for them to read. you literally just sat back and hoped that they just happened to be scrolling through their news feed of subscribers and hoped that they came across your story. I could also say that being a part of the Vocal community of writers on social media was also a big help.

I am a member of several Vocal hosted groups on my Facebook page and they have been a big help in me spreading the word about my writings. I am even connected with some of my subscribers on Facebook and they have become good friends of mine, at the same time I am not connected with all of my subscribers on social media, so it is no guarantee that all of my work will be brought to their attention on Vocal itself, so spreading the word of mouth is still a complicated process. With this new notifications bar everyone of my subscribers will know that I have a new story the moment it gets published and even if they do not read it right away it helps to know that they at least know it is there.

From the other side of the subscriber line the notifications bar helps me with my subscriptions. Just like my subscribers did not have the most convenient way of catching my work as soon as it is published, I also did not have the best convenience when it came to being notified about their work as well. Before the notification bell I learned about the fellow writers I was subscribed to by scrolling through my subscription news feed, which is a long and considerably exhausting process when you consider how many writers of which I have subscribed.

Alternatively, many of those writers are also connected with me on social media and are part of the same groups as me, so that's a good way for me to catch them, but just like with my case as the subscribed, I am not connected with all of them on social media, only a handful actually, so there is no guarantee that I will see all of their works if I am not scrolling through my subscriptions feed. Everyday since this icon was introduced I have been getting a ton of notifications about my subscriptions new stories and I have been able to read them a lot more frequently with the immediate alerts from the notification bar.

The new notifications bar has also been beneficial when it comes to checking the feedback and reactions to my work. Just like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc. The notifications bar also lets us know when our stories get a like or a comment, not just from subscribers, but from all readers. Before this icon we all would just go to the page of whatever story we posted and scroll to the end to see how many likes and comments we have, if any at all. Thanks to our new notifications we no longer have to play this mentally exhausting game of "searching to see if I have a like of comment", the notifications will do it all for us.

Long story short, this new notifications bar has made our Vocal experience a lot easier and I am thankful that the Vocal community heads have done us such a solid favor.