Corporate Communications: How to Make Use of Internal Social Media

Communicators have multiple platforms and channels at their fingertips when it comes to reaching employees with important messages. Yet that luxury of choice can feel like a trap – as the amount of choice has grown, it’s become more difficult to truly reach and engage employees any channel.

Everyone (i.e., all employees) now filters out information both consciously and sub-consciously in a bid to cope with information overload. For corporate communicators, in that case, channel choice becomes more important. They need to be able to allocate scarce resources to the best channels.

The best channels are not those with the most traffic, or those that employees say they prefer – the best channels are the ones that employees use to glean information and connect with one another to help them be better at their jobs. There are five main channels that satisfy these criteria, according to CEB data

To help with this challenge, CEB Communications ran a global survey of over 1000 employees to identify the best channels for improving employee performance. The survey assessed a dozen channels, from e-mail, to the intranet, to leadership blogs and briefings, to digital signage. This blog post is the first in a series counting down the top five channels. The top five are:

1. Communications from a direct manager.
2. Company email.
3. Intranet homepage.
4. Leadership briefings.
5. Internal social media.

This series of blog posts will look at each of these in more detail, starting with social media.

How to Make Internal Social Media Work for You

Internal social media is an important channel to give employees an understanding of company and business unit strategy, and how their work connects to it, helping them access information, tools, and other people that can aid them in getting their jobs done, and help them expand their peer networks – all things that are proven to make employees more effective.

According to CEB analysis, the reach of internal social media is below average in most firms – i.e., many employees don’t use it – but that the employee rating is above average – i.e., people who do use it really like it.

Given the reach and affinity of this channel, communicators should focus on satisfying target users’ needs, instead of trying to reach everyone. This means that communications teams should be careful not to over invest resources in social media, and instead target some of the other channels in the list above.

TD Bank Group is one company who took a targeted approach to increasing employee use of their internal social media platform, with great success. The comms team considered two factors when targeting employee groups: the communication needs of the team and the team’s receptivity to the channel.

For those teams scoring highly on both, Communications provides information and training to help them understand the value that TD’s internal social media platform could bring to their day-to-day work, as well as help them learn how to use it. By following a similar approach, and helping those teams most likely to need internal social media to use it more consistently, comms teams can definitely see a return on any investment.