Content which rocked across Unily in 2016

Our Customer Success Managers have looked at 20 of our customer portals with the highest adoption rates and identified the top 10 articles from each over the 12-month period. This has identified some fascinating trends that that should not only provide insight into what content works best but help inspire your own content plans for 2017. 

CEO insights

An effective tip to drive adoption is to get your senior leadership team involved with your intranet content strategy. If they lead by example, the rest of your users will be more inclined to get involved with conversations and content. We found that some of the most popular articles were from senior leaders across the business. These came in various formats, from quick status updates using announcements, in-depth interviews and longer thought-leadership style pieces. Although the social interaction with these pieces were lower than others, the views were consistently high across the board.

Community events and charity work

Intranet software is not just a place for work, it’s often a place where users can go to connect on a more personal level with others across the organization through social channels and groups. Articles and event invitations raising awareness around community events, inviting people to participate and providing information around charity fundraising initiatives were consistently popular. We believe this is because users are getting to see a more personal side to their colleagues and gives them a chance to participate online and in person. These articles also had high social interactions, particularly those which were inviting participation at community events. However, not every organization featured this type of content on their portals. If your users don’t feel empowered to post personal content around their own charity initiatives and community work, it’s time to tweak your content strategy. From what we’ve seen they’re great for driving engagement.

Competitions

This is a no-brainer for driving intranet adoption, particularly if your intranet is newly launched. We saw high view rates of articles and events that highlighted the latest corporate competitions, from winning a gift voucher, to coming up with the new intranet name, to choosing the new company mascot. With the ability to integrate forms onto any type of content, these articles also see lots of interaction, with users entering details to participate or sharing their comments via social channels with ideas and suggestions.

New stuff

Every user wants to see the company they work for move forward and break new ground. We’ve seen some awesome examples of this type of news being shared across Unily in the past year. From new offices opening, new partnerships being made and new stadiums being built. To help this apply to your organization, this could be something as simple as a new technology you’re using, a new product, a new season of clothes or a new canteen. People care about the new, shiny stuff!

Informative

This goes without saying, but the intranet should always be the central repository for your most essential and important information. For example, this year we saw numerous articles addressing the EU Referendum. Users take comfort in the fact that their senior team are addressing serious issues inside and outside of the office and publishing a fully-fledged article through the intranet is a far more reliable and enduring approach to sharing news as opposed to email.

New hires / latest jobs

Not all HR Managers might consider the intranet to be the best place to share recruitment news but our research has shown it’s some of the most popular type of content, sitting in the top 10 articles for over 50% of portals we evaluated. Whether it’s an article summarising the new roles that are on offer or to highlight new starters and hires across the organisation, people like to understand the happenings across the organisation.

Intranet how-to

How-to and instructional intranet content was also high on the lists in 2016, with articles such as “how to search for a document” and “how to complete your profile” ranked highly across our clients. This is killing two birds with one stone, driving users to the intranet and consuming content, whilst enabling them to start using and understanding how other functionality can benefit them. Instructional videos were more popular than just news articles or insights, with a handful of customers creating ‘how to get started’ videos to on-board users to the intranet.

Lunch menu

No explanation needed.

Code of conduct

Don’t be afraid to use the intranet to share your code of conduct information. It may not be the most engaging but it racks up the views on the intranet as it’s need-to-know information. Whether this relates to your social media policy, mandatory training to be undertaken or regulatory content, having the information out there through internal communications channels is better than hiding it away in a document.

Insider videos

In global organizations, employees often find it hard to get an insider perspective of what’s going on across other departments and teams. To counteract this, our clients are posting insider videos that give a personal look into various sectors of the business. This might be a sneak peek at a new stadium development or an inside look at a particular factory in Hong Kong but the personal format of these videos is racking up the views.

Key takeaways:

Having analysed over 200 pieces of content for this blog, we’ve drawn some key conclusions on what makes truly popular content. So when you’re drafting your next piece of content, keep this in mind:

• Articles should come from a range of user types and departments. It’s essential to get a varied demographic of users publishing and posting onto the intranet as it’s the diversity that keeps users coming back for more. Don’t rely on the internal communications team to create every piece, open up Content Management System permissions to users that you trust.
• Tagging and metadata is essential. One common denominator with these top pieces of content is that they were effectively tagged with topics. This increases content’s findability tenfold across the intranet and ensures they’re being targeted to the relevant users across the business.
• Consider your medium. 2016’s most popular pieces of content weren’t restricted to one medium. A combination of short announcements, articles, insights and videos drove interest from communities.
• Keep the content coming. The portals where we see the most engagement all have one thing in common – fresh content is always being added. Once you know what’s popular, keep creating and publishing new content and don’t let it get static.