Before launching, many companies are worried that users could be flooded with information. However, this has never been the case before. If anything, the opposite is the problem: Too few news articles are published, which is why many intranets and employee apps have “fallen asleep” in the past.

The misconception that there could be an “information overload” comes from private experience with social media such as Facebook or Instagram: there you often follow hundreds of profiles from major media, stars or brands, some of whom share professionally created content several times a day. What is often misunderstood is that the majority of users create their own content relatively rarely or never and only consume.

In social intranets and employee apps, there are usually also relatively few people who regularly publish news, such as management employees or HR, IT or marketing departments. After all, communication takes time, which is why larger companies have a corresponding department for it. In addition, employees are afraid of communicating something wrong or even to a large group, such as the entire company.

As a result, the number of news is limited: even larger customers from knowledge-intensive industries (e.g. banks) receive a maximum of 10 news per day, while the average is 1-3 per day — there is often simply no more news content in a company.

By comparison, an average employee receives over 40 emails per day. A printed daily newspaper often has more than 10 article headlines on the front page alone, while the total number of articles per issue is often in three digits. The average amount of content that a person consumes online on social media and on news sites such as Spiegel Online is also in the three-digit range.

Despite the relatively low number of company news, there may be employees who complain about a flood of information at just a handful of news per day, even though scrolling through the news feed barely takes more than a minute, even with 10 messages a day. The real cause of such a complaint lies in the fact that company news is often perceived as uninteresting — particularly among the over 87% of employees who, according to the Gallup study, have little or no emotional connection to their employer.

It is therefore all the more important that content on intranets and employee apps is up to date: since you can't force people to read, this is the only way to increase reach.