Internal social network – best practices

1. Develop an internal social network strategy

Before you start conducting activities on your internal social media, realize that you have access to a valuable tool that can help you engage and integrate your employees. However, you need to plan your actions carefully. The best way to do this is to create an internal strategy in which you define the objectives of your activities on your new enterprise social network. You will be able to adapt your content more easily and evaluate its effectiveness by developing evaluation criteria. 

2. Plan an internal event and series of workshops

Remember to always keep in mind that your employees are completely unfamiliar with the new tool. Therefore, you need to help them get to know it. When choosing your internal social network and comparing different competitive solutions, you had a lot of time for consultations to learn about the tool and its benefits. Your employees didn’t have the chance to learn why they need social media at work at all since they use standard, popular social media to contact other employees at work. They also use other communication channels, often simply making one-to-one appointments. 

The answer is to make the deployment a major internal event with shared first sign-on. Reward first message authors with special gifts. Prepare a series of workshops showing how to operate the new system. Emphasize the complete security of all data and files in these media and emphasize that by separating social media at work from private ones, they take care of the work-life balance. Prepare tutorials and put them on your intranet or knowledge base so that everyone can access them at any time.

3. Lead your employees by example

When employees see that internal social media is active and diverse posts or articles are being published regularly, they will start to participate in discussions and, in time, publish their content. Initiate contact from the beginning with questions and surveys. Involve your team and team leaders in the active use of internal social networks from the very beginning. Observe your employees’ engagement grow! 

4. Ask team representatives to contribute content

Ensure the authenticity of the publications by using employee-generated content. Using user-generated content in marketing is very successful. It is worth adopting such solutions at work. The content will engage others and introduce the profiles of colleagues from other departments. They can also benefit from professional experience, which they will share.  

5. Observe what employees write about and analyze their actions

Take care of the good vibe of the communication. Implement internal netiquette and moderate content so that no hearsay or unverified sources of information are revealed about anyone and anything. Internal social media is also a place where employees sometimes share their creative ideas or complain about something that doesn’t work. HR should keep a close eye on this and respond, but appropriately, and reward employees for reporting problems. Analyze employee engagement and interactions on an ongoing basis. This will allow you to see which activities are successful and which are completely useless. Plan further actions based on the observations. 

6. Take advantage of gamification

Through analytics, you will see who is most active and whose content is most popular. Reward such people with the title of the internal social communicator of the month. Prepare small gifts for such people, such as shopping vouchers. Once a year, prepare something special and sum up the whole year. The user of the year should get something great as an award. 

We hope that by implementing the above steps you will be more successful than we anticipate. Remember to always encourage employees to share thoughts – treat all attempts with friendship and don’t hold it against employees for being so distrustful at first.