Insider’s social team wanted to properly leverage the hundreds of articles published on Insider and make those gripping headlines dynamic and visually appealing to its followers on Instagram. The goal was to create a social strategy centered on graphics and design and make a conscious effort to look at what’s new, what’s trending, and what our audience finds fascinating and willing to engage with on the social platform. Through the use of headline cards, carousels, motion graphics, Reels, and Stories, we aimed to make Insider Business an Instagram account that invites readers into our stellar reporting and leads them to visiting our site.
When curating the Insider Business account, we picked stories that were timely, relevant, and important for our audience to see. We deployed a selection and assignment process that involved our audience producers creating the graphics based on our in-house style guide so that every asset created is consistent, cohesive, and crafted with the Insider brand in mind. We also kept a consistent posting schedule and strove to publish three to five curated posts a day based on what was making waves in the news cycle. The team reviewed posts, captions, and social copy before they were posted to ensure they met our best practices, were grammatically accurate, and included any relevant hashtags or mentions.
Additionally, our graphics producer sent a monthly report to delve into what worked versus what didn’t, along with the top posts by reach, impressions, and saves, and views for videos. With this data, we gained a great sense of what our audience was engaging with. In that reporting, we’ve denoted some successes which included the following:
The average reader engaged more with the content when we had no more than 7 slides within an Instagram Story
Users loved our weekly business-centric news quiz via Instagram stories; one quiz became our highest-viewed story on the account within the past two years with 347,000 views
Video slides on stories performed best when they were right at 15 seconds as seen with our story featuring Insider’s “10 Things in Wall Street” newsletter which garnered nearly 30K impressions and 28 click links.
One challenge the team has consistently faced on the platform was figuring out how to direct users to the news stories on our website, since Instagram has not been one of our major drivers of site traffic. This is where Instagram’s quiz feature came in handy – the ability to link out to our stories helped drive some users to our site as they clicked through each story slide.
Our strategy in using carousels, headline cards, graphs, and Reels to showcase the reporting from our newsroom could be implemented across a diverse array of topics within our business and finance coverage: Big Tech, well-known CEOs, Wall Street, markets, work-life balance, and more. The combination of our reporting paired with our unique graphics and reels help the Insider Business account stand out from our competitors – and make it a familiar source of news for Insider’s following.
Our efforts have contributed to the Insider Business Instagram account accumulating 4 million followers – the largest following out of all of Insider’s Instagram accounts. Overall, our posts have hit a reach of nearly 42 million with 316K shares and 1.2 million saves. The team has created and posted assets at a consistent cadence and has continued to experiment with more motion graphics in feed posts, Instagram Stories, and Reels, allowing Insider’s business content to shine and be discovered.
