Where Yammer excels over Teams

Many organizations are unsure where to share social communications. Take a read through How to Share Org-Wide Communications in Microsoft 365 to learn more about selecting the right solution by considering how company culture, company size, audience, persistence of message, intent of communication and integration across Microsoft 365 will impact the effectivity of your message. Still not sure if you should pick Yammer or Microsoft Teams? There are some features available in Yammer that are not available in Teams:

Mark a best answer in Yammer

In an org-wide Team, you can post a new conversation or announcement. Within those two post types, you can also choose to share praise or embed a Microsoft Form. In Yammer, you can post a discussion (similar to a new conversation in Teams), praise, or poll (similar to embedding a Microsoft Form) as well. Yammer is the only solution where you can post a question. You then get the additional ability to mark a response in that thread as the best answer. In Teams, you are left scanning all responses to identify if there was an answer that was sufficient. Learn how to use questions and answers in a group.

Embed Yammer in SharePoint

Yammer has an out of the box web part that can be configured to surface conversations or highlights in modern SharePoint Online pages. Remove the friction for your colleagues and offer them areas to engage in conversation in context. Learn how to use a Yammer web part in SharePoint Online.

Browse the Yammer Home Feed

Teams provides push notifications when you are @ mentioned or there is a reply to your post. Teams will also bold the name of a Team and channel where there is recent activity that you have not seen and you were not @ mentioned. This supports consuming specific information in context.

Yammer offers a Home Feed that surfaces posts from communities you are connected to, people you are close to, trending messages, and SharePoint News. This supports a more organic discovery about what is most recent and being widely consumed. The Home Feed removes the need to drill into specific communities and then identify what is most recent, popular, or important.

When you are looking to build community around common interests, flatten your organization, drive executive engagement, gather org-wide feedback, identify a subject matter expert, or seek cross-functional involvement in an initiative posting in Yammer will best support the visibility of your message without requiring an interruption to the organization via an alert or effort from an employee to find the information.


Depending on your use case, one of these features in Yammer may be critical to the success of your message. What other features help you decide Yammer or Teams?

One thought

  1. I’m a big fan (always been) of Yammer and long time user since it came on the scene. It helped me with my career, it built my networks (who have long since become my friends and even customers many years later). I think many organisations don’t understand it because they don’t understand the bigger picture of how their people can harness collective smarts through it. Everyone thinks and works in silos. Culture plays a big role too. Organisations focus on the wrong thing. When I hear leaders ask “what’s the point of Yammer?” In my head, I hear them ask me “what’s the point of engaging our people?”

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