9 ways to boost intranet adoption with video & UGC

In most companies where we implement social intranets like our favorite  LumApps, we see that the burden of keeping the platform fresh with new, relevant & employee-oriented content lies on the shoulders of typically very small internal communications teams.

So if you have little resources and even less time, how can you scale content contribution organization-wide, making your social intranet a place for and from all employees?

The answer is UGC or User Generated Content: valuable, fresh & relevant content that is produced not by a central organization, but by your audience itself. UGC has proven to be the top strategy for brands to connect to their audiences in an authentic and emotional way in external communications and marketing. So if it works for Coca-Cola, Apple, National Geographic, and just about every Instagram-focussed startup, why not think like a marketeer when driving engagement with your employees?

Apart from saving some workload for the internal comms team, the content generated by your employees has the advantage of being authentic and trustworthy and helping employees connect to their peers, your company’s values, and its mission – on a human level.
Without further ado, here are 9 easy-to-implement UGC use cases you can build in a matter of hours (especially with LumApps).

1. Personal Blog Posts

No matter what your business is, you almost certainly have a part of your employees that are experts in their field, that are vocal and proud of what they know & do every day. 

Make them feel special and offer a simple way for them to contribute articles or blog posts showcasing their experiences, stories & thoughts with their colleagues. Do you have people writing articles on Medium.com, LinkedIn, or other popular blog platforms? Those are the influencers you need to get the ball rolling internally!

2. “5 Questions for”

Whether it’s new joiners or people that have become part of the office furniture, it’s always insightful to learn more about your co-workers in a personal way. 

Offer a blog format with 5 to 10 predefined questions that give your employees a more intimate view of what makes their colleagues tick. Ask questions like

• “How would you describe your job to a 4-year-old?”
• “What’s the biggest mistake you made here & how did you fix it?”
• “What is the 1 person in your team that you can turn to for help & advice?”
• “What’s the one topic outside of work that gets you excited about ?”
• “If you were a car, which brand & model would you be ?”

Added bonus: drop in a Spotify or YouTube playlist with that person’s favorite music, podcasts, or recommended videos!

3. Video

With more and more global workforces being composed of millennials and Gen Zs, video and short-form UGC video should be your number one choice for driving intranet adoption, if you want to compete with the consumer experience your employees are having in their favorite apps like Instagram reels, Snapchat, YouTube, and Netflix.

Think about setting up dedicated communities where your employees share videos from company or customer events, company-organized workouts, or even sharing videos of issues or incidents on the floor (retail, manufacturing, pharma) to be escalated to HQ teams.

4. Recommendations for communities

UGC in internal communications should not be restricted to topics closely linked to your core business or activities. Consider opening up topics that people are passionate about, where your community of enthusiasts will take off like a rocket because the community already exists outside of your social intranet.

Some successful ideas we have seen implemented:

• Netflix recommendations: what to watch?
• Top 20 YouTube videos for laughs
• YouTube tech training playlists
• Travel recommendations & places to stay
• Healthy food recipes you can prepare in under 30’

Make sure you know what your employees care about before launching something like this – it has to be a fit with your employee personas (for example, our tech nerds at Devoteam G Cloud will probably have quite different interests compared to retail or factory workers).

5. Caption this / Meme contests

Contests are a great way to stimulate UGC, and the more visual the material, the easier it is for most people to contribute with very low effort.

Besides contests where you ask employees to share their best holiday pictures with some company merchandise visible, creating “Caption this” contests is a super easy way to get adoption going.

Post a weird image of someone high up in your company’s food chain – with their consent of course – and ask employees to “caption this”. 

Humor is a surefire way to drive engagement – of course, it gets the endorphins flowing, but sharing it also stimulates (co)creativity in your employees and further strengthens emotional ties between them.

6. Collective WIKI

Rather than having a few people manage your knowledge articles, open them up and make all your experts contributors. If you are using a tool like Confluence, this is baked in of course. If you are using dedicated social intranet tools like LumApps, set up the governance to allow all employees to contribute, but use a validation workflow to keep minimum control on the quality and correctness of the information submitted to your WIKI knowledge base.

7. Peer Recognition

On the Maslow pyramid of basic human needs, one is particularly important for your employees: Esteem. We all want to feel recognized and worthy, and doing this in a more or less organized way on your social intranet is a great way to boost the adoption of the platform and cater to the needs of your employees to be valued and recognized.

We see customers posting “Employee of the Week” posts (managed centrally), but an even better way is to set up “Kudos” communities, where any employee can nominate their co-workers for a job well-done, for being amazing, or for just always being there to help out.

Just beware notification overload of likes & comments ahead!

8. Gamification

If your employees are generally competitive (not always the case, so make sure it fits with your company culture), a good contest will always boost those interactions on your platform.

Gamification in 3 steps:

• Give people a clear mission in a fixed timeframe (e.g. write a blog post, participate in sports challenges, come up with crazy ideas for your new office space)
• Let employees collect points for all actions you want them to take
• Create & visualize leaderboards of your challenge rockstars on your social intranet, and provide fun & stimulating incentives to get people to participate (also: an award ceremony live stream, Oscars-style, will certainly double your page views)

9. Seasonal UGC campaigns

“It is (always) the season to be jolly” – indeed, seasonal topics & holidays are the perfect time to set up short UGC campaigns relying on user-generated content: posting images of your Christmas tree, ‘make-me-jealous’ picture contest for posting your next holiday destination or celebrating International Women’s day with an ode to all awesome ladies in your company.

In summary: be creative and let your employees do the hard – no, I mean the ‘fun’ – work of sharing what they care about! 

Looking for tips on how to implement these use cases with LumApps? Get in touch – it’s easy and very rewarding 🙂