Insider’s social team used Twitter threads and Twitter Spaces to showcase the newsroom’s best reporting and grow brand recognition. Instead of linking to our site or a YouTube video, the team broke down long-form, complex videos into a format that was digestible and familiar to our Twitter audience. We utilized native tools like polls to make them as engaging as possible and gifs and graphics to emphasize the most compelling aspects of the content. With Twitter Spaces, we co-host them with reporters and their interview subjects in order to drive subscriptions, engagement, and traffic.
The short-term objective of Insider’s Twitter strategy was to reach wide audiences for every story, packaging our content in a way that our followers find valuable enough to follow our account, share with their followers, or engage with the post. In the long term, the objective with showcasing this work was to prove to our audience that Insider is a publication worth investing in and reading or watching for years to come.
According to the Pew Research Center, over half of Americans get their news from social media, Twitter ranking the third most popular. The audience is clearly there and our theory was that by shifting our focus away from clicks and towards brand development and long term community engagement we’d find much more value.
We analyzed the tools that were available on the platform and how the average news consumer used them and engaged with them on the app. We independently tested and decided which tools and functions were most effective. For example, Twitter fleets were something we quickly determined didn’t bring much value to our audience. Threading however, had become a staple of Twitter culture and could be leveraged in multiple surfaces of the platform we converted and pitched as Moments for the Trending tab.
Audio-based apps and tools took off during the pandemic, with each social platform creating their own version. We had tried every iteration and saw the most success on Twitter. Before hosting our own Twitter Space, the team listened in on other Spaces on the platform to learn about their features and best practices.
Over the course of 2021, we’ve received a total of over 200,000 retweets across our threads and gained nearly 600,000 followers. Some of our most successful threads and moments include:
710 Indigenous people were reported missing from 2011 to 2020, a report found
Several gay Afghans told Insider how they live in fear of their life after the Taliban's victory.
In meeting our objective of developing a long-term and loyal audience for Insider, we earned over 13,000 subscribers to our website from Twitter in 2021. As the newsroom took notice of the strategy, we have spent time training reporters how to create their own threads on personal accounts. We have then leveraged these posts by retweeting them onto our brand accounts or incorporating them into moments. We’ve continued to streamline our process, hone in on our visual elements, and track published threads and moments in a spreadsheet to note how many retweets it received and if our pitch is picked up on the trending tab.
We hosted three Twitter Spaces focused on crypto stories. An Insider reporter co-hosted these interview-style chats with high-profile subjects (https://twitter.com/wallstreetbets, https://twitter.com/crypto_birb, https://twitter.com/scottmelker) with large social followings and influence within the crypto space. During the chats we pinned a tweet with a link to the article we were discussing directly to the Space. This helped drive traffic back to our site, as well as subscriptions since these articles were paywalled.
Over the course of three Twitter Spaces we had over 4,000 listeners and gained 5 subscriptions to our site. We also gained over 100 followers during each chat.
