Microsoft has just introduced a new option for internal communicators to cross post SharePoint news to Viva Engage. You can now publish a SharePoint news post in a Viva Engage storyline or community, increasing the visibility of your content directly in your enterprise social network channels. This blog post covers this new capability and answers related questions.

Who is SharePoint news cross-posting for?

I think that internal communicators who already have SharePoint and Viva Engage as part of their communications strategy will benefit from this feature the most. This feature is also a good opportunity for communicators who are looking for new ways to engage with their audience within Microsoft 365.

Remember that the starting point for your content creation needs to be SharePoint; otherwise, cross-posting doesn't work.

How does SharePoint news cross-posting work?

Within a SharePoint page, you can click either the Promote or Amplify buttons to kick off the cross-posting process for your content. After selecting your storyline or one or more communities in Engage, your post will appear in Engage in full fidelity, and you will have the same commenting experience across both platforms. After content is cross-posted, the SharePoint commenting section is replaced with the Engage commenting experience, which gives users much more engagement options than what SharePoint provides.

From my point of view, this is one of the most impressive capabilities of this feature because it enables a consistent content engagement experience across both applications, giving users the same comments, replies, and reactions across both platforms.

Do SharePoint and Engage share analytics?

The in-built SharePoint page analytics shows how the cross-posted news is performing in Engage, which gives communicators channel performance visibility. In Engage, you can then see channel-level analytics for reach, reactions, and comments. So, not all post-related analytics are in one single place: view metrics in SharePoint and engagement metrics in Engage.

It isn't great that communicators need to go to different applications to retrieve analytics for their content. This split experience makes it more difficult for communicators to understand the full scope of their content performance.

Do I need a Viva Amplify license?

One thing to note is that this feature doesn't require a Viva Amplify license. However, if you are familiar with Viva Amplify, you will know that cross-posting is already available from Viva Amplify. The new cross-post functionality gives you the same cross-posting option as in Viva Amplify but directly at the SharePoint level.

From my understanding, the only thing that changes when you have a Viva Amplify license is that the Promote button in SharePoint is renamed to Amplify. The functionality remains the same regardless of a Viva Amplify license.

When can I cross-post content?

There are many scenarios where cross-posting can add value, but imagine that we create a SharePoint news post to announce a new product launch. We could cross-post this news post to Viva Engage to increase the visibility of the announcement and benefit from the richer engagement experience offered by Viva Engage. This could help us generate more discussion and feedback on the new product launch, which could be valuable for the product management team.

Closing thoughts

The new cross-posting feature gives communicators more content distribution options; however (and keeping in mind I am not a content strategist), if we cross-post too much content, we might end up diluting the focus of our content strategy. I think that instead of creating content that is tailored for SharePoint, you might end up creating content that is tailored for Engage, which may not be as effective in reaching the target audience or work well for SharePoint and Engage. Also, you will end up creating more noise, and the value of SharePoint might be questioned.

My recommendation is that you make sure cross-posting aligns with your content strategy before using it, and that you have a clear separation between the roles of SharePoint and Engage in your internal communication.

Thanks for reading,
Jarbas