Yammer Discovery – What is in my feed?

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With the new Yammer comes a new Yammer home feed. This is the place for you to catch up on conversations happening in the communities you belong to today and what’s most important to you.  

Additionally, one superpower of Yammer is discovery – discovering new communities and new conversations that help broaden your perspective, includes viewpoints, deepens experiences that may not come across you path otherwise directly in your home feed.  

What we have learned through the years is that our Yammer customers are curious – you want to know what is in your feed and why it’s there. Plus, we know that you want to be able to educate the rest of your organization when they have questions.  

Below we are some ideas of how to use tools in Yammer to continue to boost the discovery of content within your network’s home feed.  

What’s new with the Yammer feed?  

The feed in Yammer has two main purposes – the first is to help you stay on top of your communities, people and topics you follow. And the second is discovery – there are so many conversations that are happening, the feed finds conversations from people, communities and topics that we think you might be interested in. We are constantly tweaking the feed based on your interactions with the people, communities, and conversations.   

Once you are caught up in the communities you belong to, Yammer may point you to a new community that may be of interest to you.  

And if you don’t regularly check Yammer.com you’ll receive Yammer discovery email that includes the highlights of the Yammer communities is based off previous interactions that you or your co-workers have made that you might find interesting.  Plus, the Yammer mobile app feed will be the same as you see on the web, so you won’t miss anything when you are away from your desk.  

We have heard that you want to know what is in your feed and why. Your curiosity has helped with a project that will explain in product why you are seeing what you are seeing in your feed.  

Download this Yammer infographic and share with your communities as they begin to understand how their Yammer feed works!

How can I impact the feed?  

Network admins can select specific conversations to be Featured Conversations for a specific date. These conversations will be highlighted at the top of the Home Feed for everyone, until they have been read by the user. This can be a strategy for the network admins to help shape the culture, spotlight leaders and share expectations of specific use cases of Yammer.   Once they have been read or interacted with, these featured conversations will still be highlighted but will not be at the top of the feed. 

Also, Network admins will be able to Mute Communities from the home feed. These communities can still exist and thrive, but they won’t be the primary focus of content for the network.  

Community Admins can also send announcements, which creates notifications via email, your Yammer inbox as well as push notifications in mobile.  Announcements will get a slight boost in the feed but aren’t guaranteed at the top, there’s a balance with push notifications and discovering directly in the feed.  

All Yammer users have additional opportunities to curate their own feed.  Yammer users can mark up to 10 specific communities as Favorite which helps to pull in content from those specific communities and similar communities into the feed.  

Furthermore, there may be communities that might not be as productive for you personally, and you as a user can mute specific communities. This allows you to keep the focus of your Yammer feed on what is important to you and your work.  

What’s next?  

We’re on a journey to continuously fine tune the algorithm and incorporate more signals from the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite as it relates to discovering new conversations in Yammer. We continue to work on improving the home feed to discover new communities, to include new conversations for different ideas, and bring people together throughout your organization regardless of geography or time zone. 

We are listening and learning from you and your interactions and how you respond. And we have already heard customer feedback from these changes who are discovering conversations and communities that they might not have otherwise. 

Tell us, what is something you have discovered in Yammer recently?  

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.