How do you improve engagement on an internal communication tool?

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By internal communications tool, I understand a platform where people in an organization interact in a semi-formal or informal way. Organization-level announcements, event updates, HR, and leadership speaks are shared on an internal communications platform.

Assumptions and Clarifying Questions

  • What do you mean by engagement? What are the expectations?
    • A certain percentage of people should like/dislike or comment on posts.
  • What is the objective of the app?
    • Keep employees informed about the happenings in the organization, like events, achievements, new HR policy in an informal or semi-formal way.
    • Employees can also share their opinions on a topic and start a constructive discussion.
  • Is this a tech organization? / How tech-savvy are the employees?
    • It’s a tech company with a huge number of employees across countries.

Pain points

  1. The first point is to set the expectations right. When I say social media, I imagine a platform, where I share my opinions or experiences with my peers. My audience can be my close friends, relatives, or followers, a group of people who share common interests. I can share anything. There is no periphery. I can be as creative as I want with my content to keep my audience. Whereas in a corporate environment I maintain a serious persona. My audience is people I don’t personally know. So expecting the same sort of engagement is wrong.
  2. In a world of black and white, one opinion can go a long way. And it can affect the career.
  3. There is at least three social media platform we maintain. They already have our friends, relatives, colleagues, and anyone we might be interested. Another platform with no added value is just a burden.

Solution

  1. If users can share posts from the internal tool to the personal social media space can increase engagement. Personal achievements shared from the internal tool can help someone write down a caption and save time.
  2. There are platforms where posts come with some preformatted content. Again this can help users to save some time.
  3. Encourage neutral or harmless content. A large organization will have different types of people. Their hobbies, sense of humor, and personalities will be different. Encourage the diversity. Positivity should reflect on the content.
  4. Engaging quiz or poll like movie ratings, book reviews and video games can increase engagement. Many surveys can happen on this tool.
  5. A badge system can be introduced based on the involvement of an employee.

Metrics

  1. The things I would want to monitor are, how often people are using the new features like preformatted captions. Thus we can find the scope of improvement.
  2. How many people are sharing the content to their personal social media platforms.
  3. How are people responding to the polls.

Conclusion

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Linkedin are including features every day to keep the users within their ecosystem. So competing with them in terms of functionality is not a smart move. People generally interact/ engage when they find appealing content. Hence, the real solution is to discover a continuous flow of engaging content.

If you like my analysis, keep reading my case studies.