Yammer Best Practices — Increase Adoption & Engagement

1.  Fill out your Profile so your colleagues know what skills you possess. Be sure to add a Profile photo.

2.  Fill out your Org-Chart. The Org Chart is what drives the following suggestions engine, which ensures you're receiving relevant updates and sending updates to relevant colleagues.

3.  When you first join, be sure to introduce yourself. Stating your role at the company and how long you've been there is usually a great way to break the ice.

4.  Watch the Yammer Video Tour to understand how to use Yammer and the value it provides:

5.  Set up your mobile device with iPhone app, Blackberry app, and/or SMS:

6.  Install the Desktop or FireFox Extension on your computer:

7.  Keep messages short, think "elevator speech": readers should be able to read your post in less than 7 seconds.

8.  To send a private message to another user start your message with to:username. The advantage of private 1 to 1 Yammer messages, over IM, is that your messages are archived and searchable forever by you and the recipient.

9.  Use @username to address a particular person. Address specific colleagues if the update pertains to them or if they should respond. You can also reply to another update, with @username, to accomplish the same thing.

10.  Join Groups you're interested in here:

If there's not a Group for your department, create the Group here:

Be sure to invite or add the people in your department to the Group as well.

11.  Post your message to the most relevant Group and use Tags, if applicable. This ensures proper message delivery to members who deem themselves as experts or interested in the subject matter.

12.  If you forget to add a tag to a message, simply reply to the message with the tag. Entire threads are associated with tags.

13.  Don't worry about people receiving messages that they may not be interested in. Yammer is structured so the recipient can choose what content they receive based on what or who they follow. Just make sure you post to the most relevant Group and use the appropriate Tags.

14.  Tell other people what you're working every time you switch projects or when you or your team delivers something significant.

15.  Prefer messages with business value rather than personal status update (try to avoid messages such as "I just had a good lunch" and such)

16.  Before asking your colleagues a question, Search Yammer using the search bar in the upper right. It may have already been answered.  (reduce redundancy)

17.  Turn threaded view On, in bottom left corner of feed, if discussion threads are hard to follow or you're trying to catch up after a lot of activity.

18.  Receiving too many emails from Yammer? Fine-tune your notification preferences within your email settings.

19.  Check the #joined tag feed to see who's joined recently. Welcome new members as they join and make yourself available to answer questions.

20.  Encourage conversation by taking a controversial stance on something that matters to you and your colleagues. It will get people engaged.

21.  Ask the question: "What value do you get from Yammer?" and post an example. It will help everyone understand.

22.  Develop an internal Yammer resource group within the organization. (i.e. people like you) can assist new users with questions and also help publicize and demonstrate new features. Ideally, these individuals should be familiar with the Yammer Blog, Forum, and follow @yammer_team on Twitter.