Instagram is where it all began for House of Highlights (HoH).
Since its inception, HoH has held a powerful presence on Instagram by, at the time, utilizing the added video feature to upload NBA highlights and moments with a unique voice in each caption that made followers feel like they were watching each clip with one of their friends. From these humble beginnings 7 years ago, HoH has grown its presence on the platform to over 30.6 million followers currently. As the years have gone by, HoH has continued to make it a goal to invest in the creative features of Instagram to deliver more and diversify the content followers get to view from the account. New features such as IG Stories and IG Reels, saw HoH adapt its approach to utilize these features for the benefit of the company as a whole. By doing so, HoH began to build partnerships with corporate clients and created branded content that often lives on IG stories and viral moments that celebrate youth culture online can be found in HoH’s IG Reel catalog. As the largest US-based sports media account on Instagram, HoH’s presence is primarily known on Instagram and would not experience the success it has today without the impact it made on the platform and the impact it continues to make to this day.
Instagram has always been the “bread and butter” for House of Highlights (HoH) and has been the platform that most people associate the company with. Boasting over 30.6 million followers and counting on the platform, HoH has solidified itself as not only the top US-based sports media account on the platform but also as dominating a presence as any media brand globally. Instagram has been the pivotal tool of achieving the objective at House of Highlights of being a media company that owns at the intersection of sports and youth culture. IG stories and IG Reels are two major features that HoH has adopted into its business strategy to achieve the company goals. IG stories have become the primary tool of the brand to reach back out to fans and to encourage more engagement on the account. The brand has developed recurring segments that live on IG Stories with franchises such as “This or That'' and “HoH Trivia”. These recurring franchises provide fans with content that they can interact with on each slide instead of skipping over; ensuring that their voice is felt, heard and recognized. IG stories have also proved to be a profitable tool for the company as well. HoH often partners with companies to create sold IG stories and branded content that lives on the account’s stories for 24hrs. From partnerships with Nissan for promoting the Nissan Fan Cave to partnerships with XBOX promoting the new “Forza Horizon 5” video game, IG stories on House of Highlights have become a destination where not only fans benefit from but advertiser brands as well.
On the other hand, IG Reels has been used by HoH to enhance its overall presence on the site through diversifying content offerings to make fans the highlights. With youth culture being a primary focus of House of Highlights, the account utilizes IG Reels to celebrate these moments and viral moments with the short-form vertical video format on Instagram. Instead of the traditional clip from the night’s top games, Reels found on the account relies on user-generated content (UGC) that is captivating and relatable to the Gen-Z audience. A challenge the account faces is when HoH posts content that is similar or near-identical to its parent company, Bleacher Report. In order to overcome the duplicate posts, HoH now utilizes the collaboration post feature on Instagram that allows two different accounts to share in a single post. So instead of seeing an identical post on both House of Highlights and Bleacher Report accounts, both accounts can share specific posts. HoH is constantly finding new ways to apply Instagram’s features to benefit the account as a whole which has led to building the overall presence the brand has earned on Instagram today.
There were plenty of wins that House of Highlights was able to put on the board in 2021. One of the biggest wins the account experienced can be summarized in its follower growth. Throughout the year, HoH was able to add 9.63M followers in 2021 which was an incredible increase of 46% from the year prior. Growth like this helped the account hit major milestones such as surpassing 20 million followers at the beginning of the year and ultimately 30 million followers towards the end of the year, solidifying itself as the most-followed US-based sports media account.
While follower count and growth is a powerful display of House of Highlight’s dominant presence on Instagram, the content performance on the page gives further insight into the account’s success. Videos are primarily shared on the account and the page was able to drive a whopping 7.44 billion views in 2021. When considering the audience interaction, such as the likes, comments, and shares, HoH saw over 2 billion total engagements with its audience which exemplifies why and how HoH has become the most followed sports media account on the entire site.
