Engaged employees are happy employees, and engagement can only be achieved through a good internal communications strategy. As Rita Linjuan Men, an associate professor in the department of public relations at the University of Florida, says, “How employees feel about the company and what they say publicly forms the basis of how external stakeholders view the company. That’s why we say a favorable and enduring organizational reputation is built from within.”
This article explains what an employee social wall is, why it works better than traditional internal channels, and how to build a strategy around it.
An internal social wall is a tool that helps keep employees informed and involved in the company’s culture. It can be used to share information about events like internal celebrations, milestones, or company values. A social wall is a digital space where people can share content, such as on intranets or office screens. It’s important to moderate these walls to keep them safe and to gather and display content in real-time. It pulls content from different places, like social media, direct contributions, and internal channels, and displays it in one place that any employee can see.
It’s not just a screen with a Twitter feed on it. A well-configured employee social wall combines:
- Social media posts from employees using a company hashtag
- Direct Posts, so employees who don’t have personal social media accounts can still participate
- Company announcements pulled from internal feeds or RSS
- Event highlights from town halls, conferences, or team gatherings
The result is an internal social feed that looks and feels more like a living community than a one-way broadcast.
Aggregate employee-generated content from LinkedIn
Why traditional internal communications strategy tools fall short
If you’re trying to create a connected workforce using email newsletters and static intranet pages, you’re facing a difficult challenge. Here’s why:
People get tired of emails. The average office worker receives over 100 emails per day. An internal newsletter competes with everything else in that inbox, including messages from customers, managers, and automated alerts. Even well-designed newsletters get ignored.
Static intranets don’t help people connect with each other. An intranet page that shows the same company news for two weeks doesn’t create a sense of aliveness. Employees check it, find nothing new, and stop checking.
Frontline and non-desk employees are often overlooked. A lot of people who work in manufacturing, retail, and hospitality don’t sit at a computer all day. These industries often don’t have good digital tools for internal communication. If your communications strategy requires an email address and a desktop login, you’re already excluding a large number of people.
One-way communication doesn’t build culture. Real culture grows through shared experiences, peer recognition, and active participation — not through announcements from headquarters that leave no room for response.
This is exactly what a company internal social feed is for.
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An employee social wall solves these problems. Here’s what happens when you add one to your internal communications strategy:
You make participation frictionless
The main reason employees aren’t more engaged is friction. People won’t post to a hashtag if they can’t find it. They won’t contribute to an intranet if logging in is a three-step process. They won’t share content if they have to create a social media account first.
Direct Posts removes the social media requirement completely. Any employee can scan a QR code at a company event or on a screen in a break room. This will allow them to submit a photo, message, or update directly. You don’t need to log in, create a social account, or download an app.
This is especially helpful for internal communications in manufacturing companies and other industries where many employees don’t use email and don’t have desktops.
When employees see their colleagues’ posts on a wall, it creates what behavioral scientists call social proof. Social proof is the sense that participation is normal and welcome. The first few posts on a wall encourage the next dozen. When a company’s internal social media platform is managed well during an event, it can create a snowball effect. This means that the more posts there are, the more people want to add theirs.
This is much better than a company email that says, “We encourage everyone to share their thoughts.” It doesn’t work to tell people to participate. Showing them that their colleagues are already doing it does.
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You include every location and time zone
For international companies, internal communication is often centered on headquarters. News is written from the main office perspective, events happen there, and regional offices experience the company’s culture mainly through translated emails.
A social wall can pull posts from company hashtags on LinkedIn, Instagram, and other platforms. It can also pull Direct Posts from any location. The posts are displayed together in a single feed that shows the full scope of the organization. It’s a powerful feeling to see a colleague from the Munich office posting on the same day as someone in Chicago.
You give leadership a real-time pulse
A social wall that is moderated gives internal communications strategy teams information about what employees are sharing and saying. A wall is different from an email newsletter because it’s a physical space where employees can see the moments they’ve captured and shared. That’s a useful signal.
Step 1: Decide what you want the wall to do
Before you start, decide how you will use it, since there are different reasons why social walls exist inside a group. You might want it for company culture visibility, with a wall on the intranet that stays up all year showing employee social posts and company news. Or you might want it for event activation, where the wall is displayed on screens during a town hall, all-hands meeting, or company offsite. It’s also common to use one for onboarding, shown during orientation to help new employees understand the company’s culture before they experience it firsthand, or for connecting multiple locations, where a wall shows posts from all offices, making the full organization visible to every employee. The use case you choose determines which sources to connect, which layout to use, and where to display the wall.
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Step 2: Connect the right sources
The most common ways for companies to share information with their employees are Direct Posts, LinkedIn, Instagram, and RSS or API feeds. Direct Posts are a simple way for employees who don’t use social media often to share information. They just scan a QR code from their phones and submit messages, photos, or videos. LinkedIn lets you see posts from the company’s page and hashtags used by employees. Instagram is more popular during events, especially when a branded hashtag is used. Company RSS or API feeds are where you’ll find news, announcements, or internal company publications. You can also use Zapier to connect Walls.io with platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams. This allows you to bring selected content from internal channels straight into the wall.
Step 3: Set up moderation
The rules for moderating internal content are different from the rules for public event walls. You want to review posts before they go live. This isn’t because employees are untrustworthy, but because some posts may not be relevant to the current topic. Or maybe some contributors may not realize that their post will be visible to everyone in the company.
The important thing is to keep a steady tone and focus for the feed. Walls.io’s AI Moderation can help you with that as it keeps your social wall professional and consistent by automatically filtering out the obvious stuff. If you need to approve or decline something, you can use the moderation queue.
Step 4: Choose where to display it
Where you put the display affects who sees it and how. Here are some common choices for internal communications:
- Intranet embed: The wall lives on the company intranet, and anyone who logs in can see it.
- Office screens: Displays on screens in lobbies, break rooms, or common areas reach employees who don’t use intranets regularly.
- All-hands/town hall screens: A live wall during a company event creates real-time participation.
- Employee app embed: If you use a platform like Staffbase or LumApps, Walls.io can be embedded directly inside the employee app.
For organizations with physical offices, combining an intranet embed with lobby screens reaches both desk and non-desk employees.
Step 5: Make it easy to contribute
If employees don’t know how to post to a wall, it’s like a display screen. So, it’s important to have a well-planned onboarding process to get employees to contribute. Put QR codes in places where a lot of people go, like break rooms, lobbies, and meeting rooms. This will make employees see the codes and go to the website. During special events, it’s a good idea to put the company hashtag in email signatures and at the top of internal messages. This helps keep it visible. It also helps to have employees write posts for newsletters. This shows that their ideas matter. It also helps to publicly thank the people who contribute a lot. Even a quick “thank you” in a meeting goes a long way toward showing appreciation. If you want people to post to your social wall, check out this post. It’s got some great ideas on how to make it easy for people to participate. Most comms teams don’t realize how simple it is.
Boost team spirit with a social wall at the office.
Use cases that work well for internal communications strategy
We’ve seen many use cases of social walls for internal comms, employer branding, onboarding, company-wide celebrations. Here are some of the most recurrent ones:
Internal company events
One of the most common reasons companies set up a social wall is internal events. A wall is a great tool for any event, whether it’s a conference, an all-hands meeting, or an anniversary celebration. It gives all the attendees a shared space where they can post messages during the event, on screens, and online. This makes the event more interactive and keeps everyone involved.
WorldatWork is a good example of this. For their biggest event of the year, Total Rewards, they put up a wall on screens between sessions and put it on the event website early. They even added a poll that asked, “What are you most excited about?” to get people excited about the event early on. For their 70th anniversary, they did something different. They collected only Direct Posts and scanned historical photos to mark the milestone.
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Onboarding and orientation
A good onboarding process is important for hiring and keeping your best employees. Any good HR team is always looking for new ideas to improve the onboarding process. If you want to make your workplace fun and exciting, onboarding is a great opportunity to set the tone from the very beginning, and a social wall can help with that. Check out our onboarding ideas for inspiration.
Employee recognition programs
Programs that recognize employees don’t get much attention. It often happens that a manager compliments the work of an employee during a meeting, or HR sends a birthday e-card via email to someone, and no one hears about neither. A social wall helps spread the message and makes it known company-wide. This way, every employee is looking forward those moments of fame, and will in turn put more effort in their tasks. This use case is very helpful for remote teams.
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CSR and social impact campaigns are another common use case for social walls. Companies use them to share information about volunteer work, sustainability initiatives, and community engagement efforts that would otherwise be unseen. They gather posts and photos from employees across the organization and put them all in one place so people can see the combined impact of these efforts.
Bearingpoint is a good example of this. To celebrate ten years since it was bought by its managers, the consulting firm ran an internal CSR campaign called “10 Days of Caring.” It used a social media wall to display posts from offices around the world. This motivated employees to take part in the philanthropic campaign. The campaign was a big success. Around 600 posts used the hashtag, and earned and owned media covered it. This shows that CSR campaigns can drive meaningful organic engagement even in a B2B context when there’s a central place for people to share what they’re doing.
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Is an employee social wall the same as a company intranet?
No, an intranet is a website that gives employees access to information, policies, and tools. A social wall is a live content feed that shows content created by employees. They work well together. Most teams put their social wall inside their company’s website rather than using them as separate channels.
Do employees need a Walls.io account to post?
No. Direct Posts lets anyone with a QR code or link share content without needing to log in or create an account. Only the admin team managing the wall needs a Walls.io account.
Can the wall be moderated before posts go live?
Yes. Walls.io supports pre-moderation, which means that every post is reviewed before it appears on the wall. You can also use post-moderation, where posts appear immediately but can be removed, or AI Moderation to filter automatically. Most internal communication use cases work best with pre-moderation.
Can a social wall be added to existing employee apps like Staffbase or LumApps?
Yes. Walls.io can be added to most employee engagement platforms using an iframe. Some platforms, including Staffbase and LumApps, already work with Walls.io for this purpose.
What data and analytics does Walls.io provide for internal walls?
Walls.io provides analytics on the number of posts, the number of contributors, and the number of times the content is displayed. This data is useful for internal communication teams that report to leadership. It shows how much people are engaged and how often they participate across the organization.