The Yammer guide to internal communications

The new Yammer has been designed to provide internal communicators with the tools to share, inform, and engage employees at the scale that modern enterprises require.  If you are responsible for company-wide communications, executive communications for leaders, or manage communications for a specific group of people or virtual events, Yammer has you covered. Yammer has continued to deliver new features to help you create, share, and promote your content to maximize reach and visibility. And now, you can track insights to identify reach and understand the impact of your efforts. Here are some tips on how to use Yammer for better communication.

 

 

Create company-wide communications  

 

Transform your All Company community. Communicators can take ownership of All Company, rename and rebrand it, and then restrict who can post there. You can use this space as a billboard by customizing the cover photo to highlight news, upcoming events, or important initiatives and campaigns. Edit the info box to include the rules of engagement on Yammer and pin important resources for your organization to have at their fingertips. You can also host virtual events directly from this community for all employees to attend and watch, giving you an easy to use tool for company townhalls.

 

Ensure critical announcements get delivered. Extend the reach of your campaigns by announcing questions, praise, polls, and conversations. By using priority announcements, you can guarantee delivery of important messages by overriding individual user notification settings for them to receive an email notification. Learn how to do this here.  

 

Create and establish company-wide topics to support campaigns. Use topics to organize, curate, and connect knowledge across communities in Yammer. Use hashtags to support organic expression and internal campaigns as part of larger conversations in the organization. Understand the differences between topics and hashtags here.

 

Resources:  

• Campaign Playbook

Create compelling leadership communications  

 

Host townhalls and virtual events within leadership communities.  Use Yammer to create two-way dialog between leaders and employees. Use this space for virtual events to broadcast company meetings and have real time Q&A.  Learn best practices from the team at Microsoft who uses Yammer to host Satya’s Nadella’s monthly employee town hall.

 

 

Engage with conversations right from Outlook. React and respond directly to conversations from Outlook via interactive emails. And coming soon, you’ll be able to participate in the leadership community directly from Outlook.  

 

Post on behalf of a leader. Working together with communicators, leaders can delegate posting on Yammer making it easy for leaders to start conversations. Yammer encourages two-way conversations, so be sure that messages posted on your behalf are authentic discussions. Learn some best practices and how to set up delegation in just a few clicks.   

 

Share short videos directly from the mobile app. Leaders can share a short video to share what’s on their mind and what they’ve been up to. You can annotate and upload your videos directly to Yammer or link them from other sources.  

 

Additional resource: 

• Leadership Engagement in Yammer  
• How to host a Live even in Yammer 
• Microsoft Townhall Event Playbook 

Promote content in communities   

 
Featured Conversations in Yammer. Bring attention to important conversations by featuring a conversation for a certain length of time. When you feature conversations in Yammer, you will gain more traction, dialog, and awareness on specific discussions. Organizations can have multiple featured conversations at the same time.

 

 

Pin important announcements and messages for community members. Keep vital community information front and center for employees by pinning it in Yammer. Pin and unpin conversations as new messages become relevant. You can pin any type of discussion posts, like questions, polls, and praise.  

 

Use community cover photos as additional opportunities to promote your campaigns. With community cover photos, you can customize the graphic to include details about upcoming events, campaigns or information about the initiatives.  

 

Share the content with a target audience. Send announcements to specific audiences by using the share option.  Track the reach of your message with conversation insights. See how Aon, a Microsoft customer, shared specific messages and gained a high traction for their training classes in this Customer Story blog post. 

 

Include Yammer conversations on other portals or websites for a one-stop shop for information. Add Yammer Conversations on SharePoint sites or embed Yammer feeds directly into other webpages to make it easier for your community members to engage on Yammer.

 

Resources: 

• Cover photo preview template 
• Yammer image and file sizing guide 

 

Engage with content and conversations directly 
 

Keep up with the conversations in the community. Communities with active engagement and replies help build the connection between employees online. Use filters to see the unanswered questions and new conversations in the community. Keep the conversation going by replying to the original poster or connecting them with an expert who might know the answer. If a conversation would be better answered in a different community, you can also move the conversation. 

 

Draw in experts to answer questions. Filter and respond to unanswered questions by tagging the correct person who can provide an answer. Community admins can also mark an answer as Best Answer.

 

 

Turn commenting on or off. Moderate conversations that have run their course by closing comments on a conversation. Don't worry, you have the ability to re-open the conversation at any time.

 

Measure the impact of communication efforts 

 

Track the conversation with insights. New insights give communicators the ability to see impressions, total views, click-through rates, and a breakdown of reactions on Yammer conversations. You’ll be able to see where and how the conversation was shared across the network.

 

Find community insights. Analyze community growth, knowledge, and opportunities with Community Insights. Community Insights gives you access to key metrics to understanding engagement and recognizing trends. These stats include the growth of new members, active users and their locations, and the number of questions, conversations and live events that occurred over a certain period. Measure the volume of knowledge with how many questions are asked and answered, and received high quality answers as the Best Answer. And coming soon, you’ll be able to monitor attendance, measure engagement, and compare reach across all events within your community. This will help you discover trends and optimize the event experience.

 

Join the community conversation

 

Use the Yammer Communities app on Microsoft Teams to keep a pulse on your community. Add any Yammer community directly to a Microsoft Teams channel to keep up with the conversations happening in a community. As discussions arise you can get ideas for new campaigns or find ways to add or improve supporting resources. If necessary, you can collaborate with your team on the best response before posting one more broadly in the community. Additionally, you can install the Yammer Communities app in Microsoft Teams and interact directly with all of your communities.

 

 

 

 

We are excited for you to expand your communication strategies to include Yammer in the mix of communication channels.  

 

To get started with Yammer for your organization, check out these resources: 

• Yammer training videos
• Yammer Adoption