The importance of having a dedicated person to facilitate your enterprise social network

Do you have a thriving online Enterprise Social Network (ESN) where working out loud, knowledge sharing and asking the crowd is the norm? Or has your ESN been turned on and left to fend for itself?  

If it’s the latter, you may want to think about using a community manager who can help breathe life into your ESN and nurture a successful online community.

In SWOOP Analytics’ 2022/23 Yammer & Viva Engage Benchmarking report, we found 82% of people are taking the time to access Yammer. The data confirms ESNs are used! Since 2020, our data shows a huge increase in the number of people using Viva Engage, Yammer and Workplace from Meta.  

Having a dedicated person helping you to manage your social network can be a game-changer. At the same time, they’re building an online reputation as the helpful go-to person, making it a worthy channel to use, and helping with the user adoption.  

A community manager can also focus on the analytics, making sure all questions in the main communities are answered, and bringing the right people into conversations by @mentioning them. 

Using an analytics tool like SWOOP for Viva Engage & Yammer or SWOOP for Workplace from Meta can help you deep dive and understand the community health of your social network, gather information about two-way relationships across your organisation and find how curious your contributors are. Did you know by asking a question in your post, you’re four times more likely to get a response? 

It doesn’t stop there; SWOOP Analytics can find out what hashtags and keywords are being used, and uncover who your social superstars are. This data is useful to really understand how your ESN is performing. Using this data, you can crowd-source ideas, keep a distributed workforce informed and help outsmart competitors by helping to work together to resolve customer queries.  

Unlocking true business value 

 Amy Ellis, Head of Internal Communications at PHS, knows the importance of getting someone to fully facilitate ESNs. 

 Amy Ellis, Head of Internal Communications, PHS.

“To have someone to love it, who is active, answers questions and connects people, is invaluable for the business,” Amy said at the recent Yammer & Viva Engage Festival.  

 “Managing a social network is a fulltime job, and not something I could have done by myself. 

 “When I started to explore Yammer at PHS, I knew it was important to create a community manager role to make it the successful communication channel it is today.” 

Hear more from Amy as she explains how she successfully implemented Yammer at PHS, making it one of PHS’ main comms channels in her Yammer & Viva Engage Festival presentation.

 It’s more than pictures of crazy cats 

We couldn’t resist one crazy cat pic!

From our research, we found the purpose-driven groups, such as employee networks and specialist groups that connect like-minded colleagues, are very popular in the absence of those informal catchups in the lifts or the in the communal kitchens. 

Customers often tell us how colleagues and associates go to their social networks to check in on those purpose-driven chats, and then stay online to read work-related content. 

To find out more about the importance of community management and creating a thriving community, please reach out to SWOOP Analytics.