CNN Climate captures the urgency of our climate crisis as well as actionable ways people are combating the emergency. This account shares the latest climate news and highlights how people — including our followers — are working to live more environmentally-friendly and sustainable lifestyles.
CNN has been at the forefront of climate change coverage for years, and our social audiences — across platforms — were highly interested in our coverage. So, on Earth Day this year, we launched an Instagram account to capture for this younger and active audience how climate change impacts our health, the world economy, weather, communities, and the natural world every day. The CNN Climate account also engages with our users to build a two-way conversation around how individuals are changing habits to lessen their environmental impact.
The CNN Climate account is now nearing half a million followers thanks to aggressive coverage of breaking climate news while also showcasing solutions from our followers, experts, businesses and scientific studies.
At launch, we published a dynamic Instagram Story that featured young users explaining how climate change is impacting them and their generation, what they’re doing about it, and what they think politicians and global leaders need to do. In our feed, we had multi-day coverage of the Extinction Rebellion protests, video of Greta Thunberg addressing EU leaders, a bespoke profile of a zero-waste fashion designer, and headlines around key environmental commitments businesses and governments were making. Through this breadth of coverage, we made sure to quickly showcase to our audience all the ways the climate crisis weaves through our daily lives, highlighting the current scope of the emergency while also looking to the future.
We work to engage our audience by presenting this information in a variety of formats, including:
-Headlines and images that keep this audience up-to-date on the latest climate-related news and studies, such as the Amazon and Australia fires.
-Videos that profile key climate activists and business working to find solutions to the climate emergency
-First-hand coverage from youth-led global strikes in our Instagram Stories
-Questions to our followers and user-generated videos and quote cards that feature their responses
-Sustainable-life tips that are easy to read and share
-Data-based graphics that highlight climate changes over time
-Easy-to-understand graphics outlining where US presidential candidates stand on climate-related issues and policies.
We continue to refine our strategy and look to more ways to listen and feature the voices of this highly engaged community.
We saw significant growth of 50,000 followers in just one month, thanks to our diversity in formats and aggressive coverage of this space.
We were able to show the strength of our engagement ahead of a climate-focused town hall by asking our followers how the climate crisis has impacted them. We featured some powerful responses which encouraged even more thoughtful responses from our audience.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B19T2C9prtH/
https://www.instagram.com/p/B1_haKHpevd/
We used this feature again around the new year, asking for resolutions. Again, the thoughtful replies only encouraged more response, showing how engaged this audience is.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B6tAukmJ9t7/
https://www.instagram.com/p/B6vGt05FQgW/
Lastly, this account is a strong extension of our core CNN climate coverage. We use our reader responses to help identify stories and topics our larger audience would be interested in. And during major climate news — such as the climate strikes and the Australian and Amazon fires — the engagement of this audience fuels our decisions around how to best cover these massive stories.
