I asked my son the other day where he was getting his news on the upcoming election from— he doesn’t watch TV. He doesn’t do TikTok. He’s not active on SnapChat. He doesn’t have a Facebook account & he only follows his baseball team on Twitter.
While all the talk this week has surrounded Twitter and Facebook when it comes to election season, there’s been one stealth social media platform affecting change, but not making as many headlines:
Instagram.
Once known for a place to post your selfies or vacations, it’s now become a player in the election process.
And, it’s high time local news started paying attention to it. It’s not a new platform, recently celebrating its tenth anniversary. 500 million people watch Stories daily. Compare that to Twitter’s 166 million daily active users and it’s not even close, and it’s where more than half of Gen Z’ers get their news.
But, it’s not just Gen Z, more in my generation, Gen X, have gravitated away from Facebook and into Instagram.
The problem is: Most newsrooms don’t know how to use Instagram, so they don’t use it at all or the only thing they’re consistent about on Instagram is being inconsistent. Or, even worse, they don’t even have an Instagram account.
In the words of Julia Roberts, “Big Mistake. Big. Huge.”
GETTING HELP FROM GEN Z
But, nearly two dozen local newsrooms weren’t going to make that mistake this past summer. 22 college graduates participated in the Instagram Local News Fellowship, a partnership between the Reynolds Journalism Institute and the Facebook Journalism Project. As a group, they generated:
- More than 111,000 new followers
- More than doubled their publishers’ posting frequency
- Increased interactions by 120%
- Increased Video view by 360%
HOW THEY DID IT
TEXT FEED ASSETS: It’s a trend you’re seeing across the news industry. The format is simple, yet encourages shares because it’s easy for followers to hit the paper plane underneath the post and share it in their own Stories and provide their own viewpoint, increasing the reach of the post and ultimately, your news organization.
INCORPORATED STICKERS: From quizzes to polls to questions, stickers aim to increase engagement. These kinds of “stickers” are much more than what you grew up with and are where you can get immediate feedback and discover what topics resonate with your community and which ones don’t.
INSTAGRAM LIVE: Nine of the participating newsrooms went live on Instagram this past summer, many for the first time. Only NINE. Some for the FIRST TIME. They are NEWS outlets. It’s incredible that this feature isn’t used more in newsrooms to deliver on the promise they don’t just make daily, but invented: live, local and late-breaking news.
By doing these core three items, the fellows were able to:
- Generate subscriptions
- Generate referral traffic
- Reach younger audiences
- Increase engagement
I spent more than 20 years in a newsroom as a TV producer and now own a social media content creation business, so I’ve seen this from both sides. We spent more time on making content than we do promoting it. In TV, it was always the very last thing we did when it should have been our first. I’ll admit I used to hate it when the promotional team would come to me while we were still on the air with that morning’s news to ask me what we were doing tomorrow for a :10 spot that would air on some courtroom show I didn’t even know we aired to a demographic we weren’t after…
I was living in a bubble.
At the end of the day, as journalists, we want to make an impact on people, on peoples’ lives—but, our one-dimensional approach that everything has to be on TV or on our website is, quite frankly, elitist and short-sighted when one piece of content could be sliced into a variety of different formats and distributed across multiple channels to reach a maximum number of people.
