Dive Brief:

• Employees at Lenovo were loving — and sharing widely — this article on tech news site CRN about the “10 hottest laptops of 2015.” The only thing was, they weren’t sharing it on Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn or Weibo, according to an article at Digiday.
• The article was instead posted by a Lenovo employee to its own social network, known internally as “Lenovo Social Champions.”
• That’s the latest effort by the the China-based computer company to improve levels of employee engagement and advocacy with news about the company’s products, advertising and executive speeches: an in-house social network that is meant to “empower” employees beyond e-mail and other social platforms, reports Digiday.

Dive Insight:

While internal social networks have been slow to get traction at U.S. employers, research has shown that the more employees share about a company on social media the more engaged they are with their employer, though external social media like Facebook can feel far too noisy, according to Roderick Strother, who heads employee communications for Lenovo globally.

For years, Lenovo had been getting employees to follow the company on Facebook, Twitter and Weibo, but found that the content it was hoping employees would share was getting lost.“We’re competing with everything else that they get in their social stream every day,” Strother told Digiday.

Since its March launch, 2,000 employees have gotten on board, posting “several” times a day. “We needed to be able to scale up [the network] across the organization quickly and cost-effectively,” said Strother. Lenovo currently has U.K. and some Chinese employees on the social network, and plans to roll out the program across Europe, the Middle East and Africa in the next few months.