Audience Targeting For News Posts

In this article, we will discuss how Audience targeting works with news posts using a news webpart in SharePoint. Before moving into the topic, we should know why we need audience targeting in news posts. Audience Targeting mainly refers to target a specific group of people to a specific post/page/events. For example - I have two news posts, one news post specifies information about India benefits & another news post specifies information about US benefits. Audience targeting helps India employees to focus on news post meant for Indian employee benefits rather than US employees & vice versa. This helps to provide accurate & relevant information to a specific group of people/audience in a certain interval of time.

Before moving into a few scenarios of audience targeting in news post, please follow below steps to enable audience targeting for sitepages/newspo==st: -

Step 1

Click on the gear icon on the top. Click on site contents.

Step 2

Click on Site pages. Then click on the gear icon in site pages library & click library settings.

Step 3

Click on Audience targeting settings.

Step 4

Check the box and click on Ok.

This enables audience targeting feature for site pages/news.

There are certain conditions where Audience Targeting works in news posts.

Condition 1 - Where Audience targeting works in News Post

For setting up audience targeting in news post, use news webpart. Below are the steps to proceed

1. Go to the page where you want to use audience targeting.
2. Click on Edit on the top right corner of the page as shown in the below screenshot.

Add the news webpart. Click on “+” icon and then search news in the search box. Select the news webpart.

Click on edit icon on the news webpart. This opens the settings screen on the right.

Enable Audience targeting as shown below; under Organize section do not select any news post.

Now don’t select any news under organize section. Allow it to default to the automatic selection. Audience targeting will work with specific audience setup.

Note: Audience targeting column needs to be enabled in site pages library. Specify the email address of users/O365 group for the Audience targeting column. Refer to the screenshot.

Condition 2 - Where Audience targeting doesn’t work in News Posts

Repeat step (a), (b), (c) & (d) same as Condition-1.

 e) Enable Audience targeting as shown below. Under Organize section select any news post.

Audience targeting doesn’t work with specific audience setup.

This way it doesn’t help to target the specific audience for a specific news post.

Summary

If we are applying audience targeting in news posts we need to keep in mind news post must not be organized under organize section. Currently, Microsoft provides this limited feature for audience targeting in news posts.

Now you must be wondering if I applied audience targeting on one news post can other people find it? Yes, but they can search it or browse it under site pages library. However, by default, it will be only shown to the targeted audience on the news webpart.