Focusing on your people and sharing “what’s in it for me” news angles are key to high intranet readership
Stories about colleagues or news articles with a “what’s in it for me?” angle receive the highest readership at one of New Zealand’s leading financial organisations.
The top performing intranet news stories almost always tick one of three boxes, says the New Zealand-based organisation’s intranet manager.
This financial institution, which has chosen to remain anonymous, was ranked No.3 for News readership in SWOOP Analytics’ global 2025 SharePoint intranet benchmarking analysis. That means every employee at this financial institution visited half of all News articles published on the intranet.
There are common themes among the most visited News pages and they fall into one of three topics:
They have a “What’s in it for me?” angle. For example, stories about the organisation’s benefits or recognition program are some of the most widely read news articles on the intranet.
Using people to tell the organisation’s stories. Stories that focus on a team, or a person, involved with an initiative receive high traffic.
Key “need to know” information, which ties in with the “what’s in it for me” angle. For example, significant changes to products and pricing that affect day-to-day work.
While content is key, says the intranet manager, another factor for the high readership is the use of multiple communication channels to bring people to the intranet.
“The first step is committing to your intranet as your single source of truth for news,” he said.
“Then, some of the ways we use other channels like email notifications and newsletters help drive traffic back to our intranet news stories and play a role in driving readership.
“There’s always room for improvement, so we’re currently refining our content strategy and looking at our channel mix to try and keep our people informed and engaged.”
The financial institution has several “channels” of different types of News articles on its intranet including;
Enterprise-wide stories connecting people to strategic priorities.
Culture and engagement opportunities. For example, upcoming events and webinars.
Operational updates for different business areas.
Driving people to the intranet
While this financial institution has figured out what its employees want to read about, it still has to get people onto the intranet to read this news. There are numerous tactics employed to do so.
The intranet is set as the default homepage for all employees on internet browsers Edge and Chrome.
A weekly summary newsletter is emailed to all employees on a Friday, with links to direct people to intranet news stories from the week, upcoming events, and top posts from Viva Engage.
“This replaces the automated digests from SharePoint and Viva Engage which are currently disabled in our environment,” the intranet manager said.
Other email communications will often link to content or stories on the intranet.
“Several of our operational news channels trigger notifications using Power Automate that sends a formatted email with the title, description and a link to people on specific distribution lists, which they can opt in or out of,” the intranet manager said.
“Over the last four months we’ve been experimenting with using Viva Amplify to replace some of those notifications with a full email copy of the update while still publishing on the intranet at the same time.”
When you’re writing intranet news articles, think about how you can bring a people-angle to your story – who is fronting the campaign or initiative? How does your news affect your people?
Download SWOOP Analytics’ 2025 SharePoint Intranet Benchmarking Report to learn how other organisations are bringing more colleagues to their intranets.
