Content analysis for ESN
Communities management
December 15th, 2020

How’s Your ESN Content Analysis? (You ARE Doing It, Right?)

by Grytics

Running a regular content analysis of your enterprise social network (ESN) activity is critical for understanding which communications are working (and what needs improvement).

For instance, your communities might be posting great content, the type that gets comments, reactions, and shares.

That’s great, but at the end of the day, what does it mean? And does the activity align with your communication strategy?

Furthermore, there’s still a lot of uncertainty surrounding the global pandemic and how it will affect business management in 2021.

For certain, many organizations will have to manage a ‘bi-furcated’ workplace—one that might be part onsite and part remote. Therefore, “managers need to...prioritize communication and constant contact with their workforce,” suggests the HR report, The future of work arrives early.

With your ESN analytics tool, you can measure how well your content is engaging employees and open up a whole world of strategy-based insight. Here’s how it works.

Simplify your ESN statistics

If your ESN plays a major role in your internal comms strategy, you’ll need to lean on the data. But what are you looking for? Are you getting a high-level view of the data then putting it in a spreadsheet?

Getting a concise, instant-read on the organization’s social network activity will help you align your communication strategy with employees’ performance and satisfaction—wherever they’re working.

Let’s unpack the details.

With your analytics tool in your arsenal, you can understand the communication nuances happening across the org—from group members’ back-and-forths to leadership’s announcements—helping to take the guesswork out of your comms strategy.

Here’s what your content analysis can include:

Track posts multiple ways

With your analytics tool, you can pull back all the layers on each post to understand engagement, optimal posting frequency and time and the preferred types of posts.

If you want to understand how a department manager’s posts are doing, you can see details, such as engagement per post and post interactions—comments, reactions, and shares.

You can also see the number of posts, by month, day, and hour. This information can help you understand the best posting frequency and times for increased engagement.

Additionally, what type of post gets the most attention—status updates, videos, images? For example, if the CEO’s video message to the organization gets a positive response, that’s possibly a better way to engage the staff, versus a written message.

After your CEO releases more videos, you can monitor the outcomes based on top video, most reacted-to video or most commented-on video. This type of insight is indispensable for ensuring successful leadership engagement.

Get group-specific insights

To understand how a particular group is doing, you can gather useful insights from their content. Is management fully supporting remote staff, as they, too, navigate working from home? With your analytics tool, you can monitor the following within a group.

  • Comment statistics: the most liked comments and number of comments by month, day or hour.
  • Number of viewers and non-viewers on each post: This is helpful for knowing how people are interacting with the content—who the ‘spectators’ are and working out how to engage them.
  • Number of reactions, shares, and total views: How are members engaging—within their group and org-wide?
Unlock the power of keywords and hashtags

With access to an analytics tool, you can use keywords and hashtags to get instant organizational insights. You can narrow these search insights to a specific topic to understand how the topic drives engagement.

For instance, you can get KPIs on the activity around the topic keyword ‘COVID19’—allowing you to monitor crisis communications and understand the sentiment surrounding the content.

For internal comms campaigns, the keyword can be a hashtag. Using a hashtag lets you see the type of content that’s driving engagement. Which newsletter, corporate announcement, or internal comms post was more popular or had a wider reach?

By tagging the content, you can analyze the results then curate the information to grow the audience and generate greater engagement.

Content analysis is a must-have for 2021

No one knows what shape business communications will take in the upcoming months.

One thing is for sure, to increase productivity, morale, and manage retention, internal comms will play a critical role.

Therefore, it’s imperative to move forward with an iron-clad comms strategy—one that’s based on ESN insights and ongoing content analyses.

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