Yammer Analytics: Get More Transparency from Group Insights

Everyone is a Community Manager

More and more, employees are taking on the role of community manager for individual groups on their company’s enterprise social network. Sometimes, a company doesn't have a global community manager, or maybe there are so many groups that it's become a challenge for one person to provide reporting across every group company-wide. Today, many of these group admins are realizing that they need to personally track their group activity in some way, in order to be able to determine if their engagement efforts are paying off. They're taking responsibility for their online discussions as an integral part of their day to day work efforts.

In a much anticipated move to support these group admins, Yammer has introduced Group Insights— a simple, effective set of Yammer analytics that give lightweight details about activity. Group admins can now have a look into metrics for the groups they manage to get a feel for how much their members are posting, reading, and liking the items posted in their group.

So, what do Yammer analytics look like?

Active People Summary

Yammer analytics provide rolling metrics for the last 7 days, last 28 days, or the last 12 months. The Active People Summary breaks down into the number of people who posted messages, the number of people who read messages, and the number of people who liked messages—for both members and non-members of a group. This breakdown helps admins see if they have engaged members, or if they are attracting a lot of non-members to the group. This is important because it helps admins understand the global reach of their content beyond the group's virtual walls — if a particular piece resonates, the group admin can take this information and open a strategic discussion with other areas of the business.

Posted, Read, and Liked Messages

Again, broken down into members vs. non-members, the Posted, Read, and Liked Messages information will show this activity within your group for the chosen time period. Keep in mind that if a person posts multiple time within the time frame, each post is counted (so, these numbers are not a reflection of unique user activity). This is important because it serves as a general health check on your group: are people sharing and reacting? Are people reading, but not reacting? Look for trends that indicate a healthy balance of consuming and reacting, and intervene when needed to support more engaging content if needed.

Downloading a Report

This downloadable report will provide data for every day for the last 24 months. This is great news for those who prefer to aggregate and crunch their own data on a strictly month-by-month basis (instead of “last 28 days”), or who might want to exclude weekends or holidays from their graphs.

Where Will Group Insights Head?

While there are many possibilities for metrics, this initial Yammer analytics offering covers the basics and is a great start to supporting group owners in managing their communities. That said, here are a few things we’d love to see in the future (obviously not an exhaustive list):

• A way to target non-active members, in order to determine why they don’t use the group much, and develop strategies to reach them better
• A way to know who the non-members contributors/readers are, and determine whether they are worth targeting in future strategies
• A way to find out if a specific thread has reached a certain percentage of members. This would be useful for group owners to know if their most important messages are being read (think announcements!). If the “read” rate (by members) on an announcement is greater than the email open rate for an announcement, then that would be a pretty strong case for discontinuing email
• Set a custom date range for graphs, rather than use the standard week, 4-week and year offerings

Overall, we are excited for group insights, as they offer the democratization of data that is crucial for building transparent organizations and strong communities. Have you used Yammer group insights? What do you think? We'd love to hear your feedback.

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