Have you noticed tools like Yammer and Workplace from Facebook have features suggesting you join more groups? We wondered if there is business value in that for us as users and as community managers. To find the answer, we completed an extensive analysis of group membership and participation levels, and the very short answer is a resounding YES! It’s definitely valuable to be a member of more groups. What follows below is a set of observations from our analysis and some practical, evidence-based ideas to help you increase the value you get from your enterprise social network.

We’ve picked two large organisations who have opted in to have their data analysed and benchmarked and we calculated how much each individual user had contributed to various groups. In total, we analysed almost 20,000 people who had made a total of 500,000 activities over a three-month period. An activity in this context is a post, reply or a reaction. We included only people who had at least one activity. Onto the observations and insights.

The more groups you are a member of, the more active you are

The scatterplot below shows the number of groups a person is a member of and how many activities the person has performed. You can see from the chart the activity levels go up as people join more groups.

We also found a person was, on average, a member of 27 groups and made an average of 2.43 activities over the three-month period.

The more groups you are a member of, the more groups you participate in

One of the questions we asked was if people tend to spread their activities across multiple groups, or if they tend to stay in a single group? The chart shows the number of groups people participate in increases as they join more groups.

The chart above also shows that people join more groups than they participate in. While the average number of group memberships was 27, people participate in only, on average, 3.5 groups. We also looked at how many groups most people participate in. As the chart below shows, most people are active in 1-2 groups.

More groups, less average participation per group

We found while a person’s activity levels increase overall when joining more groups, the average activity level within a group drops off. You obviously can’t boil the ocean, as the saying goes.

Insights and recommendations for Yammer and Workplace

Based on this data we suggest you run campaigns to get your colleagues to join (relevant) groups. The data shows there is value in joining more groups, as those who do it participate more overall. Since participation is by nature voluntary (even if the membership isn’t) it is evidence that more value is generated. Otherwise, they would not do it.

So what do you get out of participating in a group? You might have a question you need an answer to, or a problem you need help with. You can use the community as a resource to help. It’s simply a matter of personal productivity and efficiency.

There’s also another aspect - helping others. By helping others, you build your internal brand and reputation. You can be the person to first break news in your area, or be the person connecting people and problems with; “Oh, I read about that the other day. I believe @Charlotte can help you with that”. Being a knowledge broker is advantageous from a career perspective.

Given that most people are contributing to 1-2 groups, there seems to be plenty of room to increase participation, and that also backs up the argument that you should actively join and/or promote joining groups. Both Yammer and Workplace include features in their platform that recommend groups for people to join. That's a great start, but to really get things moving we suggest you do something actively about it. Here are a few ideas about what you could actively do to promote joining groups:

• Share interesting conversations from one group to another with an invitation to join that group.

• Write up a short summary of what a particular group is about and then advertise it on your intranet.

• Get a group member to explain what value they get from it and share that using different channels.

If your organisation is using SWOOP Analytics, you can identify top performing groups to spotlight, find out what their top conversations are so you can share them, and also find the most influential community members so you can ask them what value they have gained. That makes it a breeze to start your campaign to recruit new group members.

Before we get too carried away, we also need to realise that not everyone will participate. We saw people join many more groups than they participate in, so even if you see a great influx of new members, don’t expect the activity levels to increase proportionally. Be realistic. It is easy to join but requires much more effort to contribute and engage with fellow group members. We recommend you download and read our ‘What Good Looks Like’ guides for Yammer and Workplace, which contain valuable advice on how to generate more engaging conversations in your groups.

If you would like to try SWOOP, just contact us. We can provide a free trial to get you started straight away.