Introduction to SharePoint News Posts and how to engage your audience
News Posts are a great way to communicate with your audience whether it is organisation wide or per department There are two ways in which you can post news to the platform depending on the audience you are trying to reach.
If you click into the News site from the top navigation bar and post a news article, your news will appear on the Home page (banner carousel) of the site and will be accessible to all colleagues. If you post a news article on a department site, it will only appear on the department sites homepage. There are still ways it can be pulled through to the main homepage, however this would need to be configured by your intranet owner.
News Carousel (above)
The News Post option, when adding a news article through your News site, has an additional tick box option to ‘Show on Home’ when adding an article. The department news articles cannot be promoted to the News Carousel on the Home page because they don't have this same option.
When you create a News Post you are technically creating a "SharePoint page" (Creating a SharePoint page (perspicuity.co.uk)), so you have the same options to build your page using a series of zones and can display content by populating the zones with web parts. Web parts are applications and include such things as YouTube videos, local weather, interactive maps and much more. You can add multiple web parts to a News Post and build an engaging post for your audience.
Percy Intranet – Web Parts (perspicuity.co.uk)
When you are creating a news article, think about the end user and how they will be engaged in the content you are posting. If, for example, you are creating a new product launch event, instead of having the date for launch, post a countdown timer to show the hours, days and minutes until the event itself. If you are meeting at a specific location, include the interactive map web part to allow the user to view the location. There are many ways in which you can build your News Post in order for it to gain traction and engage your audience.
The more imagery and interactive components you use in place of just static text, will make the post more engaging. Consider how easy it is for your users to get the key information you are sharing from the news article.