Why Employee Engagement App Content Metrics Matter

Deploying an employee engagement app streamlines many tasks and opens up new lines of communication. Companies use apps to keep employees informed, ask for feedback, deliver training, and provide content that is designed to improve their engagement in their work.

In many ways, the content delivered by your employee engagement app is the backbone of the app experience. When you provide a steady stream of fresh, interesting, useful content, you give everyone a reason to check the app multiple times a day, which means they are more likely to see and participate in other types of app experiences, like employee polls or app-based training modules.

It is good to use a blend of content types to prevent monotony and to ensure you pique the interests of the widest base of app users. Some of the most successful types of content include:

• How-tos
• Content explaining why something is the way it is
• Relevant lists (“5 Ways Our Company Gives Back to the Community”)
• Videos
• Infographics

The main reason content metrics matter for your employee engagement app is that interaction with content goes along with other types of app interaction, and app interaction is correlated with how engaged your workers are in what they do.

Page Views: Are They Really That Important?

Do you remember ten or so years ago when everyone’s website included a “hit counter” showing how many times the site had been visited? It was a quick and easy way of gauging the popularity of your own, or someone else’s, website or blog.

Eventually, though, page hits became less important because, with the rise of search engines and bots, you could not be sure that 1,000 new page hits meant that 1,000 people visited your page. This is not to say that the number of times a piece of employee engagement app content is accessed is unimportant. It is important, as a baseline, particularly since your internal employee app will not be crawled by search engine bots to skew the numbers.

What is important to remember is that opening a piece of content is not the same as engaging with a piece of content. Someone could open an infographic precisely when their phone rings, so they take the call and forget all about the infographic. Fortunately, there are ways to find out whether people are merely opening content or engaging with it.

Shared Content and Why It Matters

Your social media manager will tell you that social shares and likes are far more telling than the numbers showing how many people saw a piece of content. When users take the time to like or share content, they have interacted with it long enough to make some sort of positive judgment. When they explicitly share the content, that is a strong indicator that they found the content useful, entertaining, engaging, or otherwise worth spending time with.

Employee engagement app analytics can dig deeper than simple content views and tell you things like how long people had the content open, how many people liked it, and how many people shared it. The higher the ratio of liked or shared content to total content views, the more confident you can be that your content is engaging your app users.

Your Power Users and How They Can Help

When a person or a company maintains a blog for a long time, they tend to develop a loyal group of fans they can count on to read the content, make comments, and ask questions. Likewise, your employee engagement app will develop its own “power users.” These are the people who open the app frequently and engage with it for longer than average. Getting to know your power users can help tremendously with learning what is working well, and where there is room for improvement in your app.

Be certain to identify power users from a broad cross-section of your company to avoid the risk of fine-tuning your app so much that its appeal narrows. It is just as important to know what your power user in the warehouse likes as it is to know what the power user in graphic design likes.

Encourage Employees to Complete Their In-App Profiles

You can learn more about which content resonates and how it does so by encouraging all your employees to complete their in-app profiles. The information they include will provide you with more granular insights about which content works and why. You may discover, for example, that the people on second shift access the weather section of the app more frequently, while first-shift employees who work on the third floor interacted with a recent infographic significantly.

What to Track and Why

You will want to track the basics, such as how many times the employee engagement app is downloaded and how many times it is opened. You will also want to know how many people download the app, but never use it, and how many people use it at first, but then lose interest. Not all statistics are easy to swallow, but you need to know what they are telling you so that you can provide the kind of content that will increase employee engagement.

As for pieces of content, you will want to know how many people accessed each piece of content, and how long, on average, they interacted with it. You should also track how many times content is shared or liked, particularly as it relates to how many times the content was viewed.

As more content is added, you can gain more accurate insights about whether app users prefer videos over list articles or vice versa. A steady stream of what you believe to be engaging content is necessary over a reasonable period of time (generally months) so that you can learn for certain which content resonates most strongly with app users.

Be Prepared to Fine-Tune Your Employee Engagement App

The information you gain from the content metrics for your employee engagement app will allow you to get to know your employees better and to fine-tune the app so it captures their attention and becomes a regular part of their workday. With the right employee engagement app platform, providing great content and collecting relevant statistics is easy.

With hubEngage, you have the power to create an employee engagement app that is customized to your workforce and your priorities. Your branding touches and content are easy to add, and you can set up terrific engagement elements like surveys, notifications, instant messaging, as well as captivating content in many formats. Try a free 7-day trial of our employee engagement app and discover how brilliantly hubEngage can bring employee engagement to a higher level in your organization.