What do you think about Viva Engage storylines? Does it make it easier for people to post because they don’t have to worry about finding a relevant community? Will it be wildly popular, or will it be a dud? Based on insights from Workplace by Meta, I’m going to make some bold predictions.  

Before we dive in, let us first cover some important terminology:  

• Story - an “in the moment” brief video post. It disappears after 24 hours from your storyline (see below). 

• Storyline post – a post which can include text, images, videos etc. Unlike a story, it stays on your storyline. 

• Storyline – each person has their own storyline, and you can publish either a post or a story to it. 

• Followers – if people choose to follow you, then your stories and storyline posts, will appear in their feed. 

• Community – a place where members go to connect and discuss things that are relevant to them.  

Up until now, all posts published in Viva Engage and Yammer had to be posted in a community. Now it is possible to choose between publishing on your own storyline or into a community, so you are probably wondering when to use what and why. 

I looked at Microsoft’s official communication and it stays silent on this question. Microsoft explains how storylines work and what you can use them for, but do not really position storylines against the existing method of posting to a community. I’ll try to outline why I predict that only a small and specific set of people will be posting to their storyline, while most will be reading.  

Stories and storyline posts are brand new, and Microsoft is only a few weeks into the public preview. Here at SWOOP Analytics we do not have enough Yammer data on story and storyline posts yet, however, Workplace from Meta has had a similar feature for several years. It is referred to as posting on your “timeline”. Workplace calls communities “groups” and, just like for Viva Engage, you can choose if your post should be published on your timeline or in a group. SWOOP for Workplace captures all the insights about timeline and group posts, so it takes only a few seconds to see the data. I spoke with several of our customers to learn more about the impact of posting on your timeline versus posting in a public group. I suggest that what we can learn from timeline posts on Workplace will be very similar to what will happen with storylines in Viva Engage.  

The insights I got from the conversations are based on data from hundreds of thousands of people, and it was very consistent. It was also very surprising.   

Firstly, the number of timeline posts is about 1-2% of all posts for all the companies I spoke with. This was far less than I had expected. Could it be that the feature is not known? I do not think so, as it is very visible. Could it be that it requires a rare and special situation to post on your storyline? I do not think so either. After 50-100 posts to groups, I do not think you suddenly go; “Aha - this one needs to go on my storyline!” There must be something else going on. Let’s explore.  

Engagement levels 

I wanted to find out if the engagement you get when you post to your timeline compared with a group is different. By engagement, I mean how many of the posts get a reply and/or a reaction. Here is what I learned:  

What we can see from the table above is that posts in groups get replied to, and reacted to, much more frequently than timeline posts. Let us dig further into the potential reasons for the difference and how we can use this to guide people on posting on their storyline versus a community.  

Audience matters 

When you post into a community, the algorithms will surface the post in the feed for the community members. When you post to your storyline, the algorithms will surface the post in the feed for your followers. Now, think about the size of those respective audiences. To gain followers you need to post interesting content that adds value to your followers. Unless you are an executive, it will take time to build an audience. A long time. Most people will therefore not have a lot of followers, so the audience is small.  

Communities vary in size, but as soon as you join you have an audience which is the entire community. No need to spend time building a following. In other words, you get to choose the size of the audience. If you post in a group which has more members than you have followers, then your audience will be bigger.  

There are other aspects I suggest make communities quite attractive. If you have something to say, it makes sense to go to a place where people who are already interested in the topic will congregate. This is a lot faster than trying to recruit a follower you think will be interested.   

Align with community purpose 

This does not mean that you now have the green light to find the biggest community you can and post anything you like. What makes a community successful is a shared purpose that the members rally around. For example, some communities will be focusing on a particular topic like project management, and others will celebrate achievements. You need to ensure that your post has a strong alignment with the purpose of the community. Communities with too general a purpose often end up being used for broadcasting with low engagement as neither the poster nor the reader really knows what to expect. Viva Engage’s All Company community is often an example of this, unless scope and purpose are determined.  

Now back to the main questions I started with: 

Will storylines make it easier for people to post because they do not have to worry about finding a relevant community?   
 
Yes. It will make it easier. But the question remains - will anyone read it? It will depend on the number of followers you have. If you are an executive with lots of followers it may work. If you are a regular employee, the data suggests your post will not be read by many, and I predict, therefore, few people will end up posting to their storyline. 

Will storylines be wildly popular, or will storylines be a dud?  
 
Storyline posts have the potential of becoming useful for people with a large number of followers, so for me, that means executives. For these people there is an audience, or they at least have a greater potential of building one quickly. I can’t see it becoming even close to competing with community posts for other employees, and for them I predict that storylines will be a place they go to read content from executives. If your executives are excited about storylines, then I’d definitely run with it, but I would spend most of my effort and time building even more thriving communities.  

The insights above could only be gained by using an analytics platform. Opinions without data are just opinions. Get a demo of SWOOP Analytics now, so you can deliver evidence-based guidance to your organisation.