NEW YORK, May 21, 2024 – Employees spend, on average, 16 minutes a day reading the company intranet and read one news article a week, the latest global report into real-time Microsoft SharePoint intranet usage has found. 

Digital workplace analytics provider SWOOP Analytics has published its latest benchmarking report into SharePoint intranets, analysing real-life data from more than 94,000 intranet pages and the behaviours of more than 177,000 employees. 

SWOOP Analytics found 86% of employees visited the intranet over the three-month period, with 87% of those people reading content pages, like policies and procedures, and 60% reading news articles.  

It’s important to know though that employees don’t stay long on the intranet. The average time spent on the intranet each day, per employee, is 16 minutes, with only one minute, on average, reading news articles and the remaining 15 minutes spent reading other pages. 

The challenge for those managing intranets is to tailor content to fit the brief time employees are willing to commit. For maximum impact, internal communicators need to think about what key messages to prioritise for the small window of attention available.   

Other key findings from SWOOP Analytics’ benchmarking of SharePoint intranets include: 

• The most popular times people read news on the intranet are 8-9am or 1-3pm on a weekday, with Tuesdays just edging ahead as the most popular day. 

• Almost everyone accesses the intranet via their desktop. 

• When it comes to intranet news articles, the most popular news articles attract the most attention, with the top 10% of news pages visited attracting 72% of all visit times.  

• Most employees read, on average, just one news article a week.  

• Employees allocate a finite time for reading news – a news reading “time budget”. If there are more news articles, employees will just spend less time per article reading, rather than spending more time overall reading more articles.  

• Between 300-600 words seems to be the optimal length for an intranet news article except for human-interest stories, which can be as long as 1,500 words or more. But when it comes to corporate messaging, short and sweet is best.   

• People who read the intranet are also active on Microsoft Viva Engage, but those who rely on email to communicate rarely access the intranet.  

• Intranet and Viva Engage users are the colleagues who share what they do by working transparently, and nurture conversations for all to join. The importance of this finding is that employee engagement thrives on direct interactions rather than just content consumption.   

• AI can help the non-professional editor produce better quality intranet content. 

“As far as we know, this is the world’s only in-depth study of intranet usage based on real-life data,” said SWOOP Analytics CEO Cai Kjaer. 

“Our findings will help anyone involved in running an intranet with insights into what makes a successful intranet and give benchmarks based off best practice. 

“We encourage anyone involved with an intranet to download this free resource.” 

SWOOP Analytics’ “How to manage a successful intranet” report is a must-read for anyone involved in managing, or writing for, an intranet. It provides achievable goals for intranet usage and identifies what the most engaged intranet pages and sites look like, along with real-life tips on how to launch a SharePoint Online intranet.  

Download the FREE report at: https://www.swoopanalytics.com/sharepoint-bm-24