IGN's Instagram has been a rocket ship the past few years, all thanks to a strategy that focuses on engagement and connecting people. Our objective this year was to continue our work of the past, while working through an Actors Strike that made our usual viral red carpet video difficult to get. We also have a LOT of pretenders who have cribbed our Instagram news graphic design, and we needed to continue to separate ourselves as a best-in-class news outlet that has some of the best journalists in the business designing and posting our graphics.
First off we had to find celebrities interviews in unlikely places. A great example was joining Keanu Reeves at a comic book sigining and capturing the fan interaction seen all around the world, a Instagram Reel now with 12M views. Another example is when we interviewed Goose the Cat of The Marvels while his human actors were unavailable, which now has over 6M Instagram Reel views. Pre-strike we were able to blow up the internet yet again by interviewing Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer and confirming that yes, he was just as excited to see Barbie as the rest of us (a 17 million+ view video on Instagram Reels, our biggest ever.)
With our graphic work, we upped our game to make our graphics as eye-catching as they are informative. We've commited ourselves to caring about our audience's time, knowing that we have to catch them in a moment's scroll to get the news across.
Our engagement-first strategy was a massive success, yielding 2.5 billion (with a B!) social impressions in 2023, 967 million video views, and 216 million engagements, all record totals. As a result, IGN continues to be the biggest gaming and entertainment news account on Instagram.
