Important Social Media Features You Need to Consider for SharePoint Intranet

One of the biggest shifts in the corporate environment is the influence of social networking and the various ways in which it affects the day to day business activities. Earlier, SharePoint development was never known as the top notch social computing platform, but Microsoft has now come up with great SharePoint features that are adopted to modernize the digital workplace.  SharePoint’s latest features are all strongly influenced and lifted from the top social networks and maintaining its engagement has helped to carry out useful operation that needs to be carried out consistently.

SharePoint Intranet Social Media Features:

We all know that most people on the web like Facebook to stay connected with their friends, relatives or like LinkedIn to keep professionally connected. Both the platforms focus primarily on making connections, but this does not mean accepting friend’s requests and sending requests or click the FOLLOW button in Instagram or Twitter. Connection is fruitful only when you all are engaged in interactive activities that are established between them. So SharePoint intranet should provide opportunities to the employees so that they can engage and interact among each other personally as well as publicly. Here are some key features that make social media addictive and which should be adopted by your SharePoint pages too.

Activity Based Interactions:

Social media works on the theory of initiating conversations among people having similar interests through posts. Like-minded people interact with the posts and interact with many other people and this interaction then evolves to become personal connections. With SharePoint intranet development your personal connections can create some strong professional connections and this will help to enhance the bonding between the colleagues and lead to a good work environment.

Some activities may include sharing, liking and commenting, which may be added to the basic SharePoint features to encourage people to use them. Also the intranet algorithm should be designed so that it tracks the users’ activities and analyses them and show only relevant content to boost the user experience.

 

Also Read: Setting Up Internal Communications Using SharePoint

 

Personal Profiles:

Like every social media, which allows the users to customize their profiles as per their preferences, SharePoint intranet should also allow the users to manage their profile and keep the profile page as flexible as possible. The profile page should be the space where they can practice autonomy, whether it is a theme, feature or information. If you have a SharePoint mobile app, then it should offer complete liberty to the employees to handle their personal stuffs to have a sense of belongingness.

Instant Messaging:

Fast communication plays a key role in enhancing the culture of the company and it is also considered to be the sure shot means to connect people quickly via any platform. Every SharePoint intranet must feature instant messaging in the simplest manner and it also allows to connect with the phones of the employees by integration with some messaging apps or by using a dedicated mobile app for this purpose.

Gamification:

Different social media platforms like Facebook have used the game culture a lot to gain popularity. People also use these gaming portals on social media to relax and the interactive features in these games help to make new connections easy to establish. The SharePoint intranet can also have some in house games, with some professional aspects of the company. Some percentage of the free time can be used and employees can find some refreshing moments while getting involved in organizations stuffs too. This can help to motivate the employees to use SharePoint intranet.

Adding Stories:

Stories are often a great means to keep the users engaged and this is another feature that can be effectively used to reach out to a very large audience within a short period of time. Stories are very efficient in drawing attention and consume less time for both the story creator as well as the reader. So, while sorting out features of social media, your SharePoint intranet should include this to keep the user engaged.

 

Also Read: Metadata and its Effective use in SharePoint Development