Last week I was on a call with a client who had spent months building their company intranet on SharePoint. The homepage looked polished — news sections, a compliance hub, quick links, an idea box, even custom branding. Everything was set up and ready.

And nobody was posting anything on it.

The person responsible for internal communications told me: "I've gone through so many emails, reading a lot of articles. We've used the AI to analyse them. And I'm still thinking — is this even worthy of being posted and shared? I'm so afraid of spamming irrelevant news."

His colleague's response was simpler: "Just post it."
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The fix: agree on a posting cadence (maximum one post per day), schedule a week ahead, separate breaking news from regular updates, and make it easy for anyone in the business to submit news. An empty intranet dies. One that gets a post every day or two starts pulling people in.

The technology is rarely the problem. SharePoint's news functionality is genuinely good — you can categorise posts, schedule them to publish in the future, target specific audiences, and even set up breaking news alerts. Microsoft 365 gives you everything you need for internal communications.

The problem is almost always human. Specifically, three things kill most intranets:

According to research by Prescient Digital Media, 90% of intranets are considered unsuccessful by their users. The tools work fine. The problem is that nobody ever agreed on what to post, how often, or who's responsible.

The overthinking problem. The person responsible for posting content analyses every article, every announcement, every piece of news through the lens of "is this interesting enough?" The bar gets set impossibly high. Nothing gets posted. The page stays empty.

The ghost town problem. Once an intranet sits empty for more than a few weeks, people stop checking it. That's a behaviour that's very hard to reverse. Even when you do start posting, your audience has already learned that there's nothing worth looking at.

The permission problem. If only one or two people can publish, they become bottlenecks. Every department that wants something shared has to go through the comms team, who are already overthinking everything.

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The solution isn't more training or a better-looking homepage. It's a set of rules that removes the decision fatigue from posting.

"An average post every day beats a brilliant post once a month."

Here's the framework I use with clients:
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Step 1: Set a Maximum Posting Frequency

One post per day maximum. This does two things: it prevents the fear of "spamming" by making the limit explicit, and it forces prioritisation when multiple pieces of content compete for the same day.
If you don't have enough content for one post per day, aim for 2-3 per week. The cadence matters more than the volume. People need to know that when they check the intranet, there'll be something new — even if it's just industry news or a team update.


Step 2: Schedule a Week Ahead

SharePoint news posts have a built-in scheduling feature. In the page details panel, turn on scheduling and set a future publish date and time.
Batch your content creation. On Monday, schedule the whole week's posts. If something urgent comes up mid-week, you can publish a "breaking news" post on top of the schedule, but the baseline is already set.
This transforms internal comms from a daily anxiety ("what should I post today?") into a weekly planning task ("what's going out this week?").


Step 3: Create Clear Categories

Set up news categories in SharePoint: Industry News, Compliance Updates, Team Announcements, Breaking News, and whatever else fits your business.
Categories do two things: they help the comms team decide which slot a piece of content fits into, and they help readers filter what they care about. Someone in the compliance team wants compliance updates on the homepage — they don't need to scroll past team social events to find them.


Step 4: Add More Publishers

If only one or two people can publish news, every department has to go through them. That creates a bottleneck and means the comms team has to judge content they might not understand.
Give publishing access to 3-5 people across the business. The compliance lead publishes compliance news. The department heads publish team updates. The comms team manages the schedule and handles general industry news.
This doesn't mean anyone can publish anything. Set clear guidelines: one post per day maximum, must be categorised, must be reviewed by one other person before publishing.


Step 5: Make It Easy for Anyone to Submit News

Add a "Submit News" button on the intranet homepage that sends an email to the communications inbox. The body of the email can include a simple template: "What's the news? Why does it matter? Any attachments?"
This lowers the barrier for contribution across the whole organisation. Someone in operations spots something interesting — they click the button, write two sentences, and the comms team schedules it. Without this, that same person would think "I should share this" and then forget about it by lunch.


Step 6: Separate Breaking News from Scheduled News

Create a "Breaking News" section on the homepage that only shows the most recent urgent post. Configure it to display just one item — when a new breaking news post is published, the old one disappears.
This gives you a way to handle genuinely urgent updates (security incidents, policy changes, critical announcements) without disrupting the regular schedule. Everything else goes through the normal weekly cadence.


Step 7: Pick the Right Time to Publish

Don't publish first thing Monday morning when everyone's inbox is already overwhelming them. Schedule posts for after lunch — around 1pm or 2pm — when people are more likely to browse.
​If your business spans time zones, pick a time that catches the most people during working hours. The exact time matters less than the consistency of always publishing at the same time.

One of my clients went from zero intranet posts to a consistent weekly cadence within two weeks of agreeing on these rules. Their team started checking the intranet daily. Most of the posts were pretty ordinary — industry news, a compliance update, a team announcement. Didn't matter. People kept coming back because they knew there'd always be something fresh.

Within a month, other departments were submitting content through the news button without being asked. The compliance team published their own updates. The operations team shared process changes. The idea box on the homepage started getting submissions.

"Consistency creates the audience. The audience creates the culture."

The intranet went from a dead page to the first thing people checked in the morning. Turns out, showing up consistently matters more than being brilliant occasionally.
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1. Waiting until you have "enough content" to launch. Launch with what you have. One post is better than zero posts. You can build momentum — you can't build it from an empty page.

2. Putting everything through one person. If one person has to approve, write, and publish every post, nothing will get published consistently. Distribute publishing access.

3. Overthinking every post. Not every post needs to be a polished article. A two-paragraph industry news summary is perfectly valid content. The bar should be "is this useful?" not "is this amazing?"

4. Publishing everything at once. If you have five pieces of content ready, schedule them across the week. Five posts on Monday and nothing for the rest of the week is worse than one post per day.
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5. Forgetting to tell people the intranet exists. Sounds obvious, but I've seen businesses build beautiful intranets and never send a single notification about it. Pin it in Microsoft Teams. Set it as the browser homepage. Mention it in meetings.

How often should you post on a SharePoint intranet?
Aim for 2-5 posts per week, with a maximum of one post per day. The exact frequency matters less than consistency. People need to learn that when they check the intranet, there will be something new. A regular cadence of three posts per week is better than ten posts one week and nothing the next.

Can you schedule news posts in SharePoint?
Yes. SharePoint Online includes a built-in scheduling feature for news posts. In the page details panel, turn on the scheduling toggle and set a future publish date and time. The post will be published automatically at the scheduled time without any manual action.

How many people should have permission to publish on a SharePoint intranet?
For most SMEs, 3-5 publishers is ideal. This typically includes a communications lead, a compliance or HR representative, and two or three department heads. Having multiple publishers prevents bottlenecks and ensures content from different parts of the business gets published without everything funnelling through one person.

What should you post on a company intranet?
Industry news relevant to your sector, compliance updates, team announcements, project milestones, employee recognition, process changes, and upcoming events. The content does not need to be groundbreaking. Regular, useful updates are more valuable than occasional masterpieces. A good test is whether you would mention it in a team meeting. If yes, it belongs on the intranet.

How do you get employees to actually use the SharePoint intranet?
Consistency is the most important factor. Post regularly so people learn there will always be something new. Pin the intranet in Microsoft Teams as a tab. Set it as the default browser homepage if possible. Reference intranet content in meetings by saying "as you'll have seen on The Nest" rather than repeating the information verbally. This trains people to check the intranet as their primary information source.
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If you want to set this up yourself: The Chaos Cure contains the full "What Goes Where" method — including how to structure your internal communications, intranet, and Microsoft 365 tools so your team actually uses them.
👉 Get the Chaos Cure

If you want someone to build it properly from the start: I help businesses set up their SharePoint intranet, Teams structure, and internal communications as part of a full Microsoft 365 engagement. It starts with a short discovery call to see if we'd be a good fit.
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About the author: Gavin Jones is the founder of MeeTime Ltd., a Microsoft 365 consultancy helping SMEs save time and work smarter with the tools they already pay for. With 50+ assessments completed, Gavin builds practical solutions that teams actually use — not theoretical setups that gather dust. Subscribe to the MeeTime YouTube channel for weekly Microsoft 365 tips.