Overview
Community managers often want more staff to read and comment on internal news and other content. Broadcasting every item to every user, or enabling email for every stream, can reduce engagement because users stop paying attention when notifications become noisy.
This article describes how to use audience-specific News Streams, notification settings, and analytics to deliver relevant content and measure whether people are reading and participating.
Environment
- Jive Interactive Intranet
- Jive Core
Information
Deliver relevant content instead of sending everything to everyone
News Streams are the main way Jive distributes content on the News page. Without streams, content is mainly found through search and direct links. As a Community Manager, you can create streams so that different audiences see different content.
- Create streams for a division, department, or role so users see content that applies to them. Setup steps are in Creating Divisional News Streams for Specific Users.
- Use a community-wide stream only for content that truly applies to everyone, such as a CEO blog. You can create up to 10 News streams for everyone. Setup steps are in Creating News Streams for Everyone.
- You need Manage News Streams or Manage Community permissions to create or change News streams.
When you create a stream rule, selecting a place includes any new content created there. Selecting the place's blog includes only blog posts, which produces less content in the stream.
Users can also create their own custom streams for specific people, places, and tags. See Creating Custom Streams and How to Get Notified for Content Updates?.
Reserve Inbox and email for priority communications
Following a place, adding it to Inbox, and receiving email are separate settings:
- Following shows updates in the user's Following stream.
- Inbox shows updates in the in-product Jive Inbox.
- Neither option sends email by itself. Email is controlled under Your avatar > Preferences.
When you configure a News stream, the Notify Users option can send email or mobile notifications every time new content is posted. In general, set this to off. Enable it only for the most critical content that users cannot miss. If notifications get noisy, users may stop reading the content.
For individual users, a configuration that suits most people without generating too much additional email is:
- Go to Your avatar > Preferences.
- Set Receive email or mobile notifications when there is activity in the community? to Yes.
- Enable notifications for Inbox: Activity, Direct social actions, Alerts, and Badges.
- Disable notifications for Inbox: Moderation, Company News, Following, and News Stream.
- Click Save.
If a user selects All Activity for a stream or Inbox, they receive an email every time that stream or Inbox is updated. Leave Email cleared or choose a summary option unless the content is high priority. Full preference steps are in How to Configure Jive Email Notification Preferences (for end-users). The Following versus Inbox versus email distinction is explained in Email Notifications in Jive.
Measure reads and participation, then adjust
After you target the audience and limit noisy notifications, use analytics to see whether people are consuming and participating:
- Impact Metrics on individual content items track views, emails sent, and related impact. The content author and users with admin rights on that content can see Impact Metrics.
- View Counts appear at the bottom of a content item and show how many times it was viewed.
- Community Analytics (and place-level analytics) show community and place activity. On Jive Cloud this is available by default. On-premise customers have to opt in.
- The Participation Ladder in Community Analytics breaks active users into Consumers (read or downloaded content), Participants (liked, commented, shared, or similar actions), and Contributors (created or edited content).
Use those reports to see which streams and content types are being read and commented on, then tighten the audience or reduce email on streams that are generating noise. An overview of these reports is in Analytics & Impact Metrics. Participation Ladder definitions are in Community Manager Reports and Analytics - A Comparison.
Alexandr Oliynyk
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