The Viva Engage home feed drives discovery and engagement across communities and Storylines in a network. The feed relies on algorithms to determine which posts are the most relevant to you. Every person’s home feed is different because we all care about different things. The algorithm scans all Viva Engage messages that are available to you every time you visit the feed, personalizes the experience, and shows you select conversations.
And depending on how large and active the network is, the number of conversations may be overwhelming, especially for new members. So, how does Viva Engage help you find the posts that are particularly relevant to you? What impacts this feed? And how can you help influence what is delivered? Let's take a closer look...
What impacts the home feed?
Viva Engage looks at who you follow and what communities you’ve joined. Viva Engage also looks at the conversations happening across your entire network. The more signals you provide to Viva Engage, the better job it can do at recommending content you care about.
People and communities. Whenever you visit the Viva Engage home feed, we get a list of all the of people you engage with most frequently. These are the people that you interact with in Viva Engage, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or other Microsoft 365 tools. This also includes people you follow, including leaders in your organization. We look at information regarding the employee who posted the conversation. For example, how many followers does this employee have, how much interaction you have with that person, or how active they are in the network.
For leaders specifically, the leaders posts will appear in the Home Feed of their audience. And leaders replies appear in the Home Feed if an audience member follows them. However, leaders reactions do not appear in the Home Feed. People you follow reactions do not appear in the Home Feed.
We also pull the list of communities you participate in, including official communities. For example, if you visit a community, or reply to a post from that community, then we increase the "affinity score" between you and that community. Communities with more participation receive an increased weight for the algorithm.
Collectively, we use a list of the closest people, storylines, and top communities and pull all the conversations from those two groups. Each conversation is then passed through our machine learning model. Additionally, campaigns that you follow will also be pulled into the feed.
Conversation attributes. Attributes such as the author, how long ago the message was posted, who replied, who reacted, and total engagement are all examples of the ways we evaluate every conversation to determine its relevancy to you. Other contributing factors include whether the post includes pictures and videos or whether it is a poll or a question. Adding rich media, including images and videos, can improve engagement on your posts up to 2.5x more than a post without rich media.
All posts are ranked based on relevancy and the likelihood that you’ll like or reply to them. We add all these attributes into the machine learning ‘blender’ and return a prioritized list of conversations for your feed. Additionally, it will show you unseen content to help you discover posts. Eventually, you’ll begin to see posts from other communities and coworkers that derive from this prioritized list of relevant conversations.
What makes up the Viva Engage home feed?
Once we rank all threads from the communities you belong to and the people you follow, we remove any threads from communities that you have muted. If your network admin has chosen to feature a conversation, we will show you that “Featured Conversation” near the top of your feed. This is how we assemble the final feed that you see on your Viva Engage Home page.
This is a visual representation of how the Viva Engage feed is constructed.
How do featured conversations rank in the feed? A featured conversation is a post that the community admin has boosted for a specific time window. If there is more than one featured conversation available to you, we will show the post that is nearest to expiring.
What else could show up in my feed? Recommendations for you to discover more people to follow or communities to join. We only show this module if we predict there is a high likelihood of you accepting the recommendations.
Viva Engage will also show you ranked trending content. This may be content you are not subscribed to, but Viva Engage thinks it could be interesting based on the high number of reactions a conversation is getting from many people across the org.
4 ways to customize your Viva Engage feed
The Viva Engage home feed relies on signals (previous actions you have taken) to understand what you find interesting. These are the actions you can take to influence the content in your feed.
- Join communities. Joining the right communities and leaving the ones you are not interested in helps improve recommendations.
- Like or reply to posts that are interesting to you. Interacting with conversations you find engaging will help our algorithms learn about the content you care about.
- Follow people. One of the strongest signals we use to rank content is whether you are following the author of the post or replies. Follow leaders, co-workers, and other employees of interest.
- Mute communities. Muting a community will guarantee that you don’t see more posts from that community in your feed, unless the post is featured by the community admin.
We are constantly learning from you about how you use the feed. You can expect our feed relevancy to continue to improve over time as we continue fine tuning the Viva Engage feed.
The Viva Engage feed FAQ
1. Why if I scroll through the home feed, do I still see the unread messages in my communities?
The Viva Engage feed only includes messages that were posted in the last 30 days, so it can be the case that you have unseen messages that are 31 days or older in your communities. It could also be the case that you muted a community. Messages from that community won’t show in your feed, but you will still see these messages as unseen next to the community in your list of communities.
2. Why can’t we just see a chronologically sorted feed?
The home feed uses an algorithm to help rank content and sort it based on how relevant each post is to you. Even though we don’t sort the feed chronologically, the time since the message was posted is an important input when we rank conversations. We know that the timing of the content plays a big role in whether employees engage with the post.
3. Why do I see more than one Featured Conversation in my feed?
Featured Conversations are posts that community admins can boost for a time window. If you belong to a community where an admin “Features” a conversation, then next time you go to your Home Feed you will see it in the second slot in your feed. However, there may be more than one featured conversation available. Near the top of your feed, we show the soonest-to-expire conversation. The next-to-expire featured conversation will also show near the top of your feed if you refresh your browser and so on until you run out of featured conversations that are available to you.
4. I muted a community, why am I seeing posts from that community in my feed?
The only reason you may see a post from a community you’ve muted is if the community admin featured a conversation. Given that the community admin has taken this very intentional action of boosting that conversation, we believe that it’s important for you to see it.
5. I don’t know why I’m seeing a post in my feed if I’m not a part of that community nor do I follow this author?
Viva Engage prioritizes content from communities you’ve joined or people you follow. We believe there is value in helping you discover conversations that might be relevant to you, but that you wouldn’t find otherwise. We’ve heard from customers that Viva Engage helps them expand their peripheral vision and discover discussions from people they don’t know or communities they don’t belong to. Based on previous interactions between you and other coworkers, Viva Engage can determine the affinity level between you and them. We try to help you discover these other Viva Engage members and content so that you are aware of what’s happening around you.
6. I see threads in my feed that are labeled “Recommended”. What does “Recommended” mean? Why was the conversation recommended to me?
Recommended content includes posts from people you are close to but don’t necessarily follow. It could also include posts to which your closest coworkers commented. Or it includes posts from communities you interact a lot with but you’re not a member of. We’re currently working on the recommended labels to make more specific explanations.