How to measure the success of your internal social network

This is something we have been asking ourselves from when we started to use social media internally. At Philips, it has been evolved from very basic to more advance data. We demonstrate the power of internal social networking through data supported by infographic illustrations so it is easy for stakeholders to understand how our internal social network is being used.

We are looking at some very basic data points like activity (amount of messages, comments, likes etc.) and adoption on a global level (59,000+ members) but also per business and function. E.g. we know that 93% of the Legal colleagues are on our internal social media platform and that 1% is a super user, 18% is a user and the rest are passive users. This data is extremely helpful for the Legal communications business partner. It helps her to understand the status of adoption and activity in her area of business. It also means that functions and businesses can create clear objectives and measure progress.

“What gets measured, gets managed” ~ Peter Drucker

In addition to this we also look at the most influential members of our community. This is something we do based on the amounts of likes and comments members received. Identify key members of the community is helpful in creating a network of heavy users and using this network to get feedback on upcoming features, testing new features , feedback on campaigns and sharing best practices with each other.

In our internal social media platform we make heavily use of hashtags and we report also about the most used hashtags. The hashtags are very helpful in identifying key trends and topics. Especially in combination with the top liked messages and top commented messages. Identifying trending content helps to learn from content that works and to drive higher engagement towards this trending content.

Another piece of data we look at is how employees globally are connecting with each other. We know e.g. that when somebody from Asia post a message that 59% of the comments are coming from somebody in the same region and the rest of the comments are coming from other regions. This demonstrates how our internal social media platform is helping us to globally collaborate with each other and how it is helping the organization to break down regional silos.

One of my favorite pieces of data is that we measure how our internal social media platform is helping is to connect across hierarchical level. We know e.g. that when an Executive post a message that on average 18% of the comments are coming from other Executives and that 54% comes from Middle managers and 26% comes from Employees. This demonstrates how powerful the platform is in connecting the organization across the hierarchical boundaries.

But my favorite piece of data is how quickly people reply to specific types of messages. These data points are very helpful to understand what type of messages work. A simple example is that when somebody post a message with an image that on average 60% received a comment within an hour and 92% within 24 hours. This shows that images are very engaging and that adding an image to your message might help you to get that little extra push.

Next to this we know that when a member of our community ask a question that on average 55% of the questions are answered within 1 hour and 90% within 24 hours. This demonstrates how speedy this platform is and how it helps to quickly answers questions. This is something we use to highlight the power of our internal social media platform in promotional campaigns.

We also look at qualified data to measure the success of our internal social media platform but this report is helping us to understand the dynamics of our community and to adjust our community strategy but more importantly it helps our members to improve their local communities and to drive it to a higher level.

I am looking forward to hear from others how they measure the success of their internal social network. Feel free to leave a comment!

Background information: Philips makes use of VmWare Socialcast for their internal social media network solution (ESN). Our internal social network has over 59,000 members and is integrated into multiple business applications such as the intranet, SharePoint, enterprise video platform etc.