Building up an Intranet is very easy. What’s challenging is to drive the attention of the employees towards it and keep them interested throughout. Good structure and design help in attracting, but above all, content plays the major part in keeping them engaged. A great content strategy is the key to great communication in a SharePoint intranet.
Content plays one of the major roles in deciding the extent of engagement an intranet will experience. If you want your content to incite the first reaction, it must be able to pull employees to come back and stay active within the site.
Step 1: Who are your content creators?
The first task is to identify the type of content desired to be ruling the charts of your intranet. Once that is defined, it’s very easy to identify the appropriate contributors and their responsibilities in terms of content creation and publishing.
Step 2: How to assign the content roles?
As the one stop destination for all the corporate news and information, it is necessary for the content to be properly sourced, verified and efficiently presented. Also, we need to make sure that these responsibilities don’t hamper the actual prioritized works of the employees.
Step 3: Deciding the publishing rights
Multiple people can have the admin access and publishing rights of the intranet. They can be given free hand in the way they wish to curate their content. After that, all these contents can be monitored and approved by a dedicated content manager. Engagement rises only when the essence of Newness rises.
Step 4: Organizing the content
The way the content is organized, speaks a lot about how successful the content on the intranet will be. Some of the minute technicalities that can be great boosts to the content engagement are:
Tags
Each piece of content can be tagged with some keywords which will help the intranet to show the most relevant information to the users. This can be good for both creating and finding information.
Templates
As most of the contributors are expected to be non-writers, we can provide easy-to-build-on templates to enable fast and effective publishing. This will ensure that people won’t shy away from contributing just due to the lack of writing skills.
Frequency
Consistency is the key to success for any content on any platform. Establishing a systematic and routine approach towards content posting is a small but very effective initiative. Create a systematic routine by posting similar content on given days.
Step 5: Retaining the readers
You must be knowing, grabbing attention cannot be done forcefully. Your platter must be served with a lot of useful and interesting stuffs. So, we can follow these content strategies to engage readers better:
Catchy Titles
An interesting, but short title including the main keyword
Summary
Allowing the reader to understand the topic at a glance with a short and simple gist.
Straightforward
Bring the most important information in the very beginning
Short Paragraphs
Divide your text into short paragraphs (one per idea) that will create a clear vision of what’s discussed
Attach files
Name all files correctly, to avoid confusion
Attractive visuals
Don’t be afraid to add graphs, pictures, slides or even videos that will keep the reader interested until the end. Bonus points if you add alt text on all visuals to help your search engine!
Mistakes to AVOID
Missing notifications
People should receive personalized notifications inside the intranet whenever any relevant content is published, for better visibility.
Defining relevance
You don’t want to overwhelm employees with irrelevant articles and create noise. Your intranet should push the most relevant information to employees according to their team, location, etc.
Straightforward
Bring the most important information in the very beginning
Duplicating information
If you often need to post certain information in two places, maybe you need to rethink the way you organized your sections or groups.
Limiting possibilities
Add a section with the publication where people can interact and comment. The possibility to react or even suggest possible corrections will create a sense of belonging and transparency.
Failing to update
Your intranet search engine can easily locate older information that may mislead readers. That’s why regular clean up and updating is required for eliminating irrelevant information.
Just remember that internal communication is not just about providing information but much more. It’s all about how you build up your corporate culture so that your employees will be self–motivated to take initiatives. How do people receive it? Do they remember the information given? Do they want to share in return? In fact, your SharePoint intranet platform is the place where your internal communication strategy will engage your people and make them want to contribute to company’s success.
