Social Media Features in SharePoint Intranet can be adopted to enhance and escalate a superior Digital Workplace Experience.
Sharepoint Intranet is rapidly being adopted to modernize their digital workplace by every type of organization. Therefore, maintaining it’s engagement emerges as quite an useful operation that needs to be carried out consistently. But, Have you ever tried to analyze why are people attracted to the Social media sites, just like honeybees to nectar? Is it just a mere coincidence or does it involve some psychological insights as well? And most importantly, can we replicate that exact intriguing factor and fit it into our intranet? Let’s try to find out the Social Media Features in SharePoint Intranet that can be inculcated.
Social Media Features in SharePoint Intranet : Connection leads to Engagement
As we all know, every kind of social media, whether informal like Facebook or formal like LinkedIn, each of them focus primarily upon making connections. By connections, it does not mean just sending and accepting a friend request or connect request as in Facebook or LinkedIn or just clicking on the follow button on Twitter or Instagram. Connection can be called effective only when after becoming a friend or a follower, engaging and interactive activities are established between them. So, an intranet should provide ample opportunities to the employees to interact and engage among each other publicly, as well as personally. Let’s check out some key features that make social media so addictive and that can be adopted by our intranet too.
1. Personal Profiles
Every social media allows its users to customize their profiles according to their personal preferences. The more liberty a user gets in managing his profile, more overwhelming is the sense of ownership prevailing for that particular profile. So, the profile pages should be kept as flexible as possible. At least, their own profile should be the space where they can practice autonomy be it in the aspects of themes, features, information to be included or just the way visitors see it.
Similarly, an intranet must provide the employees complete liberty over handling their personal stuffs so install a sense of belongingness.
2. Activity based interactions
Every social media works on the theory of igniting conversations majorly by interesting people through posts. People with similar interests interact with the post, which further might flourish as the interaction with the person posting as well as the people interacting with it. And this interaction then slowly evolves to be personal connections.
In the case of intranet, personal connection is vital too to create strong professional connection. More will be the bonding between the colleagues, more convenient will the work environment be.
So, activities such as liking, sharing, commenting or public praising must be added to the basic features of intranet and people should be encouraged to use them. Also, the intranet algorithms should be designed in such a way that it tracks a user’s activities, analyses them and then, strategically shows the appropriately sorted content, just the way normal social media does. This can give a great boost the user experience.
3. Clubs and communities
Every employee has an own personal identity apart from what is defined by their professional skills and their work profiles. They have their own hobbies, skills and aspirations which they might not be pursuing but, they love them much more than their professional role.
And this is exactly the basis for different communities that the social medias nurtures. These groups are known to possess a lot of bonding and cooperation. If we can implement the same principles to create clubs and communities on the intranet where people can exclusively interact with the people with shared interests and can exchange praises and criticism with each other. This can really be a great way to attract the employees to the intranet.
4. Gamification
Gaming is one of the most popular Social Media Features in SharePoint Intranet that can be adopted. Social media such as Facebook have popularized the game culture a lot. People utilize these gaming portals on social media for taking breaks. Also, the interactive features of these games make new connections easier to establish.
Our intranet can also have some in-house games, amalgamated with professional aspects of the organization. In this way, some percentage of the free time can also be utilized subconsciously for organizational works or the other way around, employees can find some refreshing moments while being indulged in organizational stuff too. This can be a great innovative step with regard to the intranet.
5. Instant Messaging
Communication plays a vital role in enhancing a company’s culture. The instant messaging system is considered to be a sure shot way to connect people quickly be it on any platform. Every Sharepoint Intranet must feature it in the most simplified form possible. It is mobile too, thus, given the flexibility to connect with the phones of the employees too, be it by integrating with some messaging app or by the use of a dedicated mobile app for this sole purpose.
6. Curation
Be it social media or intranet, risks of spread of rumors, misinformation or planned propaganda is always a threat to not only the people using it but also those off it. Therefore, every social media maintains some automated security features dedicated to warning and curation. An intranet too must have such filters that will automatically send warnings to the admins or in grave cases, automatically ban the content if any suspicious or inappropriate words as well as other media types are being circulated in the intranet.
7. Stories
Stories are one of the most popular features of Social Media Sites nowadays. They are the quickest and most effective ways to reach a very large audience in a very short span of time. These stories are very efficient in drawing attention instantly while being very less time-consuming for both the story-creator as well as the story-consumer.
So, if we are listing out features of social media to be inculcated in our intranet, Stories definitely deserve a prominent spot in it.
These were our favorite social media features that are worth including in our intranet. Did we miss out on something? Let us know in the comments below.
