RealFoundations - The secret to writing a great Yammer post

It’s no fluke RealFoundations’ No.1 Most Engaging Post ranked among the best posts of 2021 in SWOOP Analytics’ annual benchmarking of Yammer networks.

RealFoundations, the world’s foremost provider of management consulting and managed services in the real estate industry, was an early adopter of Yammer in 2009, before the platform was purchased by Microsoft in 2012. The firm utilises Yammer daily for knowledge sharing, problem solving, and communicating important topics that support optimal service delivery to its growing client base of more than 450 real estate developers, investors, owners and operators.

Lindsey Zollner, RealFoundations’ Senior Manager of Presence and Asset Support, shared the leading practices the firm employs to gain the most visibility when sharing content in Yammer:

1.       Define the intent of the post –  make sure you understand your purpose for posting: WHY is the information relevant and what are the desired outcomes for posting?

2.       Get in front of the RIGHT audience at the RIGHT time – consider WHO the audience is and check SWOOP Analytics’ Activity By Time widget to find the best time to post.

3.       Grab end-user attention – use inherent functionality like announcements, praise, polls, and include multimedia or links to elevate your message.

4.       Keep it simple – include a summarised introduction to entice the audience to continue reading.

5.       Request an action – provide a call to action to gain more engagement: WHAT do you want the reader to do with the information they’ve just consumed?

The following post was ranked as the Most Engaged Post on RealFoundations’ Yammer network in the past 12 months and was in the top 1% of Best Posts in SWOOP’s 2021 benchmarking.

The post was from Jim Valente, Global Head of Data Services at RealFoundations. The intent of the post was to gather unique client delivery facts for a future outreach campaign to increase the market’s awareness of RealFoundations’ expertise in solving problems for clients. He used RealFoundations’ All Company Yammer community to get in front of the right audience and grabbed employees’ attention by using the “Announcement” feature in Yammer. Jim kept the post to two paragraphs and, perhaps most importantly, finished with a call to action.

The post resulted in more than 100 responses from employees across the globe who were excited to share their contributions and achievements.

Key statistics from SWOOP from Jim’s post.

“We wanted to gather some distinct information about our historical, collective client delivery that we could use to further describe our qualifications and differentiators to the market,” Lindsey said.

“We think this post was ranked as the highest for a few reasons, one being that users were provided the opportunity to share their latest and greatest contributions to the firm, to which many received a virtual pat on the back! It was truly exciting to follow and learn more about our diverse capabilities.”

There were about 325 active users on RealFoundations’ Yammer network when the post was made and a whopping 96% saw it in their news feed, with about 35% actively engaged. 

“The ‘Announcement feature’ really helped expand the audience, providing an additional notification to each user, and the direct ‘call to action’ led to the increased number of reactions and replies which really exceeded our expectations for the post,” Lindsey said.

She said clearly articulating a call to action like; “We need your help, please respond” is vital for social collaboration or content sharing because it helps the audience understand what to do with the information they’re seeing.

“In this case, it was: ‘Tell us what you know and how you’ve contributed at the firm’,” Lindsey said.

Feeling comfortable and connected to colleagues

One of the biggest hurdles encountered by RealFoundations when starting its digital collaboration journey was helping colleagues feel comfortable enough to engage with each other in a public setting without spending too much time worrying about things like proper punctuation, spelling or format.

“We continue to work on this, but we’ve come a long way and now see an almost 90% active engagement across the firm, with metrics provided by SWOOP,” Lindsey said.

“Using SWOOP data, we’ve been able to identify our rockstar employees that live and breathe working out loud, and with their help, we have continued to model that behavior and encourage the rest of the enterprise to do the same.

“If you can first help end users feel comfortable and connected to their colleagues in the various channels and communities you use, encouraging active engagement is a lot easier.”

Lindsey said regardless of whether you aim to share information, ask for help with a problem, or strengthen your Yammer community, following RealFoundations’ tips for an engaging posts will help increase engagement across your network.