More and more large businesses are discovering that private podcasts are a great way to share confidential, company-wide messages with their employees. But, simply releasing a podcast episode to your workforce does not guarantee a strong audience.

If you’ve started a private podcast initiative of your own and your adoption rates are growing slower than you’d like - don’t fret. Remember, private podcasting provides more benefits than other mediums of communication. By forming a targeted content strategy and consistently evaluating key performance metrics for actionable insights, you’re bound to peak the interest of your employees. We’ve highlighted some points below to consider as you form adoption goals for your private podcast.

Setting Private Podcast Adoption Goals

Although private podcasting is an impactful form of business communication in itself, it is important to establish favorable benchmarks to track your progress and make sure your employees are actually listening.

For those who are new to podcasting, and don’t know where to start when it comes to forming adoption goals of your own, we recommend you take a look at what employee engagement looks like in other intranet systems and communication mediums you are using to share messages within your business.

When was the last time you rolled out a new method of communication? Was that successful? Would you like this new form of communication (private podcasting) to be in line with that success? What does adoption look like in these other methods of communication? If adoption is high in one medium, is engagement high as well? Note that an employee’s engagement with your content is just as, if not more, important than simply having access to it in the first place.

These are great questions to consider when setting adoption goals for your private podcast. The uStudio team can also help you form reasonable goals during your onboarding period.

Adoption in Other Communication Methods

There are tons of different methods in which you can reach your employees - but some might not be as effective as you think. In this theEMPLOYEEapp survey, 30 percent of employees said they ignore emails from their employer. And PoliteMail’s research on 56 million internal email messages found that although 77 percent of employees opened internal emails, 37 percent of recipients read those messages and only 24 percent clicked through to see links or images. Even if all employees have access to email, and adoption is near 100 percent, engagement levels certainly are not. With email communication, there are many tools that will measure on open-rate and click-rate. But, you can’t see exactly how much of the email your employees consumed.

uStudio’s podcast analytics allow you to track not only who listened to your content, but how — interrupted or uninterrupted, on a mobile device, at work and more. This will help you to create the most successful and targeted communication initiative to keep your employees coming back podcast episode after episode.

In order for adoption to be successful, the communication medium needs to be convenient and accessible. For those who have experienced higher engagement with video conferencing or face-to-face meetings, note adoption levels could be lower. These types of webinar mediums require all employees to tune-in at once, something that is hard for larger companies with a growing global workforce.

According this GoToWebinar report, which comes from 350,890 webinars hosted by more than 16,000 GoToWebinar customers, the average webinar attendance rate for webinars covering internal communication topics was 56.2 percent. And, for those attending employee training webinars, they only stayed 35 percent engaged throughout the presentation.

It’s hard to rely on a coworker to take detailed notes for those who can’t attend - with a podcast you can consume the content multiple times in a safe and secure medium, all while business leaders have the analytics to prove it.

Forum boards or web-based communication can be nice for those in different time zones, however, you don’t want to share confidential information or training material on the internet in risk of it falling into the wrong hands. Our datasheet digs deeper into why you shouldn’t waste time on Sharepoint or other intranet systems that were not designed with secure podcast communications in mind.

Internal Private Podcast Adoption Metrics

For uStudio customers who use SSO for authentication within their private podcast initiative, this offers a unique opportunity for private podcast content admins to compare user logins to credentials found on the organization’s roster. By comparing the SSO attributes passed to uStudio by user metrics, your organization can better understand login activity and track users who should be leveraging the tool. If there are members who should be using the tool but are not, it would be worthwhile to dig into why, and contact their manager for feedback.

Once your organization has reached its private podcast adoption goal, it will be even more important to take note of engagement metrics to ensure logged in users are listening and responding well to your podcast content. From there, you can make slight changes and experiment with the format of your show, your podcast hosts and guest speakers, topics of your episodes, and more.

Want to see for yourself how uStudio can help transform your business communication? Request a free personalized demo on our website and a member of the uStudio team will be in contact.