Get answers to common questions about the Viva Connections Feed

Article
05/27/2022
7 minutes to read

Question: What can I expect to see in the Feed?

The Feed will give content publishers a reliable means of distributing important news and information that their users need within their organizations. In addition, users will also see engaging content from sites they are a member of/follow and communities they follow. The list of content that users will see in their feed for the Viva Connections current release is listed in the question “Where is content sourced for the Feed?” As fresher content is added to your feed, older content will be pushed down the feed.

There are several factors to determine the content ranking and users will only be able to view content that they have permission to view. Refer to the question “How is the feed personalized and ranked?" for more information.

Question: Where does content in the Feed come from?

Content that is displayed in the Feed comes from three primary sources: organizational news published in SharePoint, posts in Yammer communities, and videos in Stream that are shared with the entire organization or targeted to user groups. Individual content items in the Feed will display for a 30-day period.

News published on organizational news sites in SharePoint SharePoint news that's published from organizational news sites will display in the Feed. Organizational news sites are communication sites that have been specifically designated as a source of authoritative news in the SharePoint admin center. In addition to organizational news posts, the following news will also be displayed in the Feed:
- SharePoint news from sites you follow and sites you are a member of
- Boosted news in SharePoint from organizational news sites
- News that has audience targeting applied from organizational news site or sites you follow
Posts in Yammer communities Certain posts in various Yammer communities will appear in the Feed. These Yammer posts will come from Yammer communities that are authorized to post to "All Company" or the entire organization. Posts that are All Company are intended to be viewed by everyone.

In addition to All Company Yammer posts, you will also see the following activity from Yammer in the Feed:
- Yammer All Company Featured Posts
- Yammer All Company Announcements
- Yammer All Company Posts
- Yammer Followed Community Featured Posts
- Yammer Followed Community Announcements
- Yammer Followed Community Posts
Videos in SharePoint hosted by Stream Stream videos built on SharePoint or OneDrive that are shared with your entire organization will appear in the Feed. Depending on how your organization stores and shares videos in Stream will impact the viewing experience for videos in the Feed.

Not all of the three sources of content will be given equal weight in the ranking, so refer to the question How is the feed personalized and ranked? for more information.

Question: How often is Feed content refreshed?

For mobile, the Feed refreshes each time the application is selected. Users can also manually refresh the Feed through the pull-down action. On the web, the Feed automatically refreshes each time the web page is refreshed.

Question: When can we expect to see a newly created post in the Feed?

Posts will typically take up to one hour to appear on a user’s Feed. Content from a newly created home site is sometimes delayed for seven days after the site is initially created. After that initial seven-day period has passed, it will take the typical one hour to appear.

Question: How is the Feed personalized and how is content ranked?

We’re experimenting and rapidly iterating on the logic used:

Chronology - Content is sorted into 3 buckets.
Promotion - Boost and Featured news is surfaced highly in each bucket.
Source Priority - “Top Down” messaging is ranked slightly higher than organic content from people around you.
Engagement - Ensure dynamic mix of content types within each bucket.

One of the primary goals of the Feed is to give content publishers a reliable means of distributing important news and information. To keep them interested and coming back regularly we’re trying to strike a balance between the engaging content, they want (from sites they are a member of or follow and communities they favorite or follow) and the information they need (SharePoint organizational news site and Yammer All Company). To achieve this, we don’t rely on a pure chronological ranking.

There are several factors such as the content’s age, whether it’s been ‘promoted’ by the organization, the publishing source, and the author’s relationship to the reader to determine the content ranking. This is to users can discover new content each time they open the Feed so it never gets boring or predictable. However, engaging content in the Feed relies on how often content is created on the SharePoint sites and Yammer communities.

Over time, we plan on continuing to experiment with our ranking and to add new factors to the algorithm we use. We will be moving over to a machine learning model that is optimized for user engagement while preserving the ability for organizations to lift important content that is recent to the top of users Feeds. (Refer to the question “What controls do customers have over the Feed configuration?” for more information).

The content in the Feed is personalized for each user based on their memberships and permissions. We always restrict what content the user sees to content they have permissions to view. In addition to any org-wide memberships, we’ll include content from SharePoint sites and Yammer communities the user is optionally a member of. The goal of having a fresh, dynamic, and engaging Feed to keep them coming back.

Question: Why don’t I see any content in the Feed?

If you’re not seeing any content in your feed, it could be because of a few reasons:

There needs to be some content published to a SharePoint site or Yammer community that you’re a member of.
Yammer Posts that are not Featured or to All Company communities or Announcements may be removed and replaced in subsequent feed views to give users more dynamic content.
The SharePoint site you are publishing from (home site or organizational news site) is less than seven days old. This issue will resolve itself and content will appear normally after the initial seven days after site creation.

Question: What are the available controls to influence content in the Feed?

There’s no configuration required to get the Feed working. For the current release, customers have the ability to impact content placement in the Feed by targeting content, or by promoting it.

Promote important ‘official’ communications - Use News boost to raise the visibility of crucial news posts.
Highlight community discussions - Feature posts in public Yammer communities that you’d like seen by the entire organization.
Publish from official news sources - Where content is from, impacts the ranking.

For SharePoint news, more filtering is available through audience targeting, which allows publishers to designate content relevant to specific groups of individuals. Examples might be employees in a specific region, building, or title. This is done by enabling audience targeting on the site where content is being published, then using Azure Active Directory groups to define the target audience. However, if audience targeting is not applied, users will still get the SharePoint News on their feed. Publishers also have the ability to promote critical messages in the Feed. News published from Org News sites has a Boost feature that explicitly tells the feed ‘this content is important’. As a result, that content is artificially pushed to the top of the feed.

In Yammer, moderators of the All-Company community can Feature a post to indicate it’s significant and increase visibility within the organization. Featured posts from Yammer are treated as important by our ranking algorithm. For communities that you are a member of, communication managers can also create Announcements within those communities, which will also be treated as important by our ranking algorithm.

Question: What actions can viewers take on the Feed?

For the current release, users on the Feed can do the following actions on posts:

Comment on a post
Reply to a comment on a post
Social Reactions – React to a post and comment
Share a post
Save a post for later

Question: What can I do to save content in the Feed after I have viewed it?

Users can bookmark content that they would like to view later by selecting the Save for Later. Content can then be accessed through the save for later feature in the Viva Connections mobile app in Teams.