You’ve just launched an intranet, what’s next?

Shakira was right, those stats (hips) don’t lie! Intranet Analytics are a great starting point to identify how your intranet is tracking, and they show us what’s improving over time and what isn’t.

Seen a dip in news article views? Use the data to identify when people are most likely to read. That might be first-sip-of-coffee time at 9am on a Monday, or 3pm on a Thursday when the afternoon sweet treats come out. You won’t know your readership patterns until you test them. Compare views in the first 48 hours across different publishing times, then let the patterns guide your publishing schedule.

Search Analytics can be just as helpful, because they tell you what your users are actually looking for. 

A feature that you might not be aware of, is in the Search & Intelligence portal within the M365 Admin Centre, which surfaces a couple of key insights: 

• Query report – this report shows the top 10 most popular search queries. 
• Searches that retuned nothing useful – arguably the more powerful of the two, because these tell you what’s missing rather than what’s already working.

Intranet Champions and Content Authors are the backbone of a succesful intranet, and without them the management of the intranet may fall entirely on you, and your immediate team. It’s important to ensure that they are brought along the journey of evolution when it comes to SharePoint Online. The case we hear time and again is this: an author attends training, builds their page and then doesn’t touch it. By the time they come back the knowledge is lost, and so has their confidence to manage their site has too. A little ongoing investment prevents this from happening:

• Run quarterly training sessions, this helps to bring new content authors up to speed.  

• Develop a Centre of Excellence (COE) or Viva Engage community to promote new features and tips, and to give authors somewhere to share their experience with each other. 

• Host ad hoc drop-in sessions, or 1:1 sessions where content authors can ask for support. 

Invest in your content authors and support them throughout the lifespan of their intranet — they’re the people who will sustain it long after launch day.

When you build a house, you build it to the specs you need at that point in time. But that house can evolve — you can extend it, renovate the cabinetry, reconfigure a room, give it a paint job, and its core purpose stays the same. The same goes for your intranet. Needing to change something doesn’t mean the original scope was wrong; it just means the organisations need have changed, and the intranet needs to flex with it.

Instead of waiting for it to become outdated, be in front of the curve. Plan a six-monthly look at your navigation and information architecture, this will usually surface a handful of quick wins — a team that’s been renamed, a site that no longer has an owner, a hub that’s grown past its original shape.

The same discipline applies to content. Homepages that don’t change tend to get overlooked, so make sure relevant, up-to-date content is being published there. If employees keep landing on an article published over a month ago, they lose trust in the intranet as a source of current information, and that trust is hard work to win back.

Microsoft often sneak new changes into the content editing experience, and plenty of them land without any announcement your authors would notice. The Microsoft 365 roadmap and your tenant’s message centre are the two places worth watching, and it only takes a few minutes a month.

I recommend experimenting new features with yourself first, work out whether it genuinely benefits your authors, and then actively promote the ones that do. Share what you’ve found as a post in your COE, or run a five-minute demo at your next champions session. 

Like any kind of goal setting, we think carefully about what our target is going to be, we write it down, and then we never revisit it. Intranet success measures tend to go the same way. 

During discovery, you might have set key measures for what you wanted the intranet to achieve within its first one, three or six months. These are often forgotten in the hype (or the comedown) that follows an intranet launch. 

The best way to measure intranet success after launch is to return to those original goals and compare them with what is happening now. Depending on what you set out to achieve, that could mean looking at adoption, content engagement, search success, task completion, support requests or whether people can find the information they need more easily. 

Revisit the measures honestly: what have you achieved, what has changed, and where is there room for improvement? 

Pair that data with feedback from the people actually using the intranet. A simple survey, a feedback web part on the homepage or a standing item in your champions catch-up will tell you things analytics never will. Asking at all signals that the intranet is still being looked after.