About an hour into a client session recently, the operations lead said the sentence that explains why almost every company intranet ends up ignored.

We were reviewing how internal news was going out. The system was working. Posts were landing, they looked good, people said nice things about them. And she was doing what good leaders do, imagining herself as an ordinary member of staff opening one of these posts on a Tuesday morning.

Her point, near enough word for word: if it takes me halfway down the article to realise it doesn't apply to me, I'm a little irritated that my time got spent. And the next time one lands, I might stop reading them, because I'm finding they don't apply to me.

That is the entire failure mode. Nobody in your business will ever make a conscious decision to stop reading company news. They will just get burned two or three times, quietly conclude that this stuff is usually not for them, and stop clicking. Once that happens, the important post, the one that really does affect them, arrives into an inbox that has already switched off.

People stop reading internal news when they cannot tell within a second whether a post applies to them. The instinctive fix is to hide posts from everyone outside the relevant group, using a feature like SharePoint audience targeting, but hiding a post removes it completely for everyone else, which kills browsing, searching and discovery for anyone who needs it later. The better default is to label the post with a visible category or tag saying who it is for, so readers can triage in one glance and skip what isn't theirs without irritation, while the post stays findable for anyone who goes looking. Use hiding for confidential material. Use labelling for everything else.

Let me walk through why the hiding instinct is so strong, what it actually costs you, and how to decide which posts get labelled and which get hidden.

Start by taking the complaint seriously, because a lot of internal comms advice does not.

When you first get an intranet working, the temptation is to celebrate volume. Look, we're posting every day. Look at the engagement. But your staff are not measuring your output. They are measuring their hit rate. Every time they open a post and it turns out to be for a different department, in a different state, about a system they don't touch, that is a small withdrawal from an account you cannot easily top back up.

In the session I'm describing, the client is in a regulated industry, so a lot of the news is regulatory. Some of it is critical to two or three people and completely irrelevant to the other fifty. Some of it is an early signal about a change coming down the line, which matters enormously to leadership and means nothing to the front line today. Publish all of that to everyone and you have not communicated. You have trained people to skim past you.

So the attention problem is not imaginary and you should not tell people to try harder. The fix has to be structural.

> Want the full method for deciding what lives where in your Microsoft 365 setup, including how internal news, channels and files fit together? The Microsoft 365 Chaos Cure lays out the whole thing, step by step: [get the Chaos Cure here](https://www.meetimeservices.com/chaos-cure).

The obvious move, and the one the room reached for first, is to send each post only to the people it concerns.

Most intranet platforms give you some version of this. In Microsoft 365 it's called audience targeting: you tag a post with a group of people, and the post then surfaces only for them. Billing news reaches billing. Compliance news reaches compliance. Everyone else's news feed stays clean.

On paper this is perfect. Each person only ever sees things that apply to them, so the hit rate goes to a hundred per cent and nobody ever wastes a click.

There's a question worth asking before you switch it on, and it came up in the session. The operations lead asked how a reader would know who a post was aimed at. Would there be a label on it? Would they be able to tell?

The answer is what makes this whole thing interesting. If a post is hidden from you, you don't need a label, because you never see it. And if you can see it, it was aimed at you anyway. Hiding does not tell anyone anything. It just removes the material.

Hidden means gone. Not de-emphasised, not lower down the page, gone from the places people look.

Play out what that means over a year.

A new starter joins the operations team. They want to understand why billing keeps chasing them for a particular document, so they go looking for the background. The three posts that would have explained it were hidden from operations, so they don't exist as far as this person is concerned. They ask a colleague instead, which takes twenty minutes of somebody else's day. This is the New Starter Test, and hiding fails it.

Someone covers a colleague's role for a fortnight. Everything they need to know was published to a group they were not in. They can't catch up, because there's nothing to catch up on.

A team lead wants to know what's coming, because good leads read sideways. They read the stuff that isn't theirs, to see what's heading their way. Hide it and you've stopped exactly the behaviour you want.

And a person who really did need a post, in a way you did not predict, never trips over it. That last one is the killer, because you never find out it happened. There's no error message when someone fails to discover something.

You have solved the attention problem by taking away people's ability to go looking. That's a bad trade, and it's invisible, which is why so many businesses make it.

Here is the version that actually works, and it is so dull that people skip past it.

Put a visible label on the post saying who it is for. A category, a department, a tag. Billing. Compliance. Case management. Whatever the natural groupings are in your business.

Now run the operations lead's scenario again. She opens the news feed. She sees a post labelled "billing". She is not in billing. She skips it. Elapsed time: one second. Irritation: none. Trust in the feed: intact, because the feed told her the truth up front and let her decide.

And the post is still there. Searchable. Browsable. Available to the new starter, the person covering next month, the team lead reading sideways, and the person who needed it for a reason nobody predicted.

Labelling solves the same attention problem as hiding, and it costs you nothing in discovery. One of the client's team put it well in the session: the tags let people filter for themselves, which is a much better idea than someone else filtering on their behalf and getting it wrong.

There's a second benefit that shows up later. Once posts carry consistent labels, you can build pages that pull them together automatically. A compliance page that shows every compliance post. A page for a particular supplier or partner that shows everything published about them. You get that for free from the labels, and you can't get it from hiding.

Two situations, and they are narrower than people think.

The first is confidentiality. Some material should not be visible to the whole business: individual staff matters, commercially sensitive information, anything with a legal or regulatory reason to be restricted. That is not an attention decision, it's an access decision, and hiding is the right tool.

The second is genuine noise at scale. If you are publishing a high volume and a specific category has no plausible value to most of the business, hiding it from the main feed can be reasonable. Even then, keep it discoverable somewhere: a departmental page, a hub, an archive. The rule is that a post can be absent from the main feed without being erased from the business.

Everything else, and it's most things, gets a label and stays visible.

Pick a small set of categories that match how your business actually divides up. Departments usually work. Keep it short: if you have more than eight or nine, people stop reading the labels too.

The whole value is the reader seeing it before they invest any time. A label buried in the back end of the page does nothing. It has to be on the thing they look at.

The moment some posts are labelled and some aren't, the reader can no longer trust the label to do the triage, and they're back to reading halfway down to find out. Consistency is what makes it work.

Write the rule down. If it is not confidential, it does not get hidden. This one line will save you a year of quiet damage.

Some things are too important to rely on someone browsing a feed. When a post carries a genuine action for a specific team, don't leave it to chance in a news list. Send a message, raise a task, get it in front of the person who has to do something. The feed is for awareness. Actions need a nudge. Keeping those two jobs separate is a large part of why the client's setup started working.

Deciding what gets labelled, what gets hidden, and what needs an actual nudge, is one part of a bigger question every business has to answer: where does each kind of information live, and how do people find it?

That shared set of rules, written down so nobody has to guess, is what I call a What Goes Where Agreement. For internal news the rule is short: label everything so people can triage in a glance, hide only what is confidential, and push anything that carries an action. If you want to see how the same thinking applies to your channels, files and messages, the [full guide to organising Microsoft Teams for a small business](https://www.meetimeservices.com/blog/how-to-organise-microsoft-teams-small-business) covers the rest of it.

Get this right and something quiet happens. People start trusting the feed. They open posts because they know the label told them the truth. And when the post that really matters lands, it arrives in front of an audience that hasn't already switched off.

Why does nobody read our company intranet or SharePoint news?

Usually because they cannot tell quickly enough whether a post applies to them. If someone opens a few posts in a row that turn out to be for another team, they conclude the feed is mostly irrelevant and stop clicking. Fix it by labelling every post with a visible category so people can triage in a second, and by making sure anything that carries a real action is also pushed to the people who have to act on it.

What is SharePoint audience targeting and when should I use it?

Audience targeting lets you attach a group of people to a news post so that the post surfaces only for them. Anyone outside that group will not see it in the news areas they normally look at. It is the right choice for confidential material, and for high-volume categories that have no plausible value to the rest of the business. For most internal news it is heavier than you need, because it removes the post for everyone else rather than helping them skip it.

Is it better to tag SharePoint news or use audience targeting?

For most posts, tagging. A visible tag or category tells the reader in one glance whether a post is theirs, which solves the attention problem, while keeping the post searchable and browsable for anyone who needs it later. Audience targeting solves the same attention problem by removing the post from view, which also removes it from search and discovery. Tag by default, target only what must be restricted.

How many news posts a week should a small business publish?

Fewer than you think, and with a rhythm. Roughly one a day is plenty for most SMEs, mixing internal updates, wins, project news and industry news. The number matters less than the quality of triage: if every post is clearly labelled and the important ones are also pushed directly to the people who need to act, people will keep reading. If everything lands undifferentiated, they'll stop, whatever the volume.

How do I make sure important internal news actually gets acted on?

Don't rely on the news feed alone. Publish it so it exists as a record and can be found later, then send a direct message or raise a task for the specific person or team who has to do something about it. Awareness and action are two different jobs. A news post is good at the first and unreliable at the second.

If your company news is going out and nobody seems to be reading it, there are two ways I can help, depending on how hands-on you want to be.

If you'd like to sort it yourself, the Microsoft 365 Chaos Cure lays out the whole method, including how internal news, channels and files fit together. [Get the Chaos Cure here](https://www.meetimeservices.com/chaos-cure).

If you'd rather look at your specific situation together, who sees what, who decides, and where things are currently falling through, it might be worth a conversation to see if we'd be a good fit. [Book a discovery call](https://www.meetimeservices.com/how-we-can-help) and we'll go through your setup.

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Gavin Jones is the Founder and Director of MeeTime Ltd., where he helps small and medium businesses get far more out of the Microsoft 365 tools they already pay for. He has run dozens of Microsoft 365 assessments and implementations for SME teams, and writes and records regularly on making work simpler.