How to manage a successful intranet
SWOOP Analytics®’ 2024 SharePoint Intranet Benchmarking Report
If you’re involved in managing, or writing for, an intranet, this is the report for you! We've analysed the real-life behaviours of more than 177,000 intranet readers across 94,000+ intranet pages over 20 organisations to produce our latest SharePoint intranet benchmarking report.
The findings from our report show exactly how people are using and accessing company intranets. Based on this data, combined with extensive research and interviews, we’ve shaped benchmarks on what good looks like for intranet usage and answer questions anyone involved in managing, or writing for, an intranet needs to know, including:
Who accesses the intranet?
How much time do employees spend visiting and reading the intranet?
When do people read news on the intranet?
What devices do employees use to access the intranet?
Is there an optimal length for news articles?
And we’ve uncovered insights including:
Less can be more when it comes to intranet news articles
People who read the intranet are also active on Viva Engage, but those who rely on email to communicate rarely access the intranet.
We also explore how AI can help intranet managers, editors and content producers.
Our report is filled with tips, real-life case studies and advice from intranet experts to help you shape content to get maximum engagement.
SWOOP Analytics’ “How to manage a successful intranet” report is FREE to download.
Join SWOOP Analytics’ 2025 SharePoint Intranet Benchmarking Study by March 1, 2025
We've analysed the behaviours of more than 177,000 intranet readers across 57,000+ intranet news pages and 37,000+ content pages over 20 organisations to produce our second annual SharePoint intranet benchmarking report that shows exactly how people are using and accessing organisational intranets.
Our benchmarking data will give you real-life insights into when people are reading the intranet,
what they’re reading on the intranet, how they’re accessing the intranet and how you can
best shape your content to get maximum engagement.
2024 Key Insights
Who accesses the intranet?
SWOOP Analytics’ benchmarking of real-time SharePoint intranet data found 86% of employees visit the intranet. An average of 87% of those visiting the intranet over the three-month period analysed read content pages and 60% read news pages. However, they don’t stay long, so it’s important to showcase the news and content you need colleagues to see so you can make the most of their short visit.
How much time do employees spend visiting and reading the intranet?
The average time spent on the intranet each day, per employee, is 16 minutes.
Average time reading news per day = 1 minute
Average time reading content pages per day = 15 minutes
While these are the average times spent on the intranet each day, it may be more useful to look at the median times spent on the intranet. The median time is the middle when all the times are arranged from smallest to largest. SWOOP Analytics’ benchmarking of SharePoint intranets found the median time reading intranet news per day is 18 seconds, and the median time reading intranet content pages per day is seven minutes.
The challenge for those managing intranets is to tailor content to fit the brief time employees are willing to commit. For maximum impact, think about what key messages you would like to prioritise for the small window of attention available.
Less can be more when it comes to intranet news articles.
When it comes to intranet news articles, SWOOP Analytics’ benchmarking of SharePoint intranets found the top 10% of news pages visited attracted 72% of all visit times.
So a handful of the most popular news articles attract the most attention and we found most employees read, on average, just one news article a week.
It seems 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. This shows the importance of streamlining messaging to get more eyes on what is needed.
Interestingly, when it comes to intranet content pages, the top 10% of content pages attract only 48% of all visit times. Unlike news pages, there is a wider spread of content pages people visit.
What devices do employees use to access the intranet?
Their desktop.
SWOOP Analytics’ benchmarking of SharePoint intranets found 98.37% of employees access the intranet via their desktop. Another 1.45% of employees access the intranet on their phone and 0.15% on a tablet.
People who read the intranet are also active on Viva Engage, but those who rely on email to communicate rarely access the intranet.
SWOOP Analytics’ benchmarking of SharePoint intranets found people who regularly use the intranet are some of the most engaged people on Viva Engage. These people are also likely to attend Microsoft Teams meetings. People who are heavy email users are some of the least engaged intranet users.
It seems intranet and Viva Engage users are the collaborators, 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.
Can AI help the non-professional editor produce quality content?
Internal communicators are usually the principal writers of news on the intranet. However, SWOOP Analytics’ benchmarking of SharePoint intranets found there is a growing number of content creators for news and content pages, many of whom are not professional writers.
This is where AI can step in to help non-professional writers improve their content for the intranet, helping them adhere to organisational style guides and give guidance.
In SWOOP Analytics' 2024 SharePoint intranet benchmarking we analysed:
177,000+ intranet readers
57,000+ intranet news pages
37,000+ content pages
822 SharePoint sites
20 organisations
Each page was analysed for:
Number of visitors
Visit time
Engagement
Experience
Quality
Page creator/editors
Date / time created / modified
Page ID
Site ID
User ID
Date / time viewed
Page length, words, paragraphs
Device used to access
We also identify the best practices used by the managers of the top performing intranet pages and share expert advice from the world’s best intranet practitioners, along with real-life tips on how to boost engagement on your SharePoint Online intranet. Intrigued to learn more?
Further reading on SharePoint
