Insta-Game: Why and How News Publishers Should Innovate on Instagram

Over 400 million people around the world use Instagram for social media, ranking it above Twitter in terms of global reach, and over 60 percent of Instagram users are under the age of 34 — the demographic least-engaged by news outlets.

Clearly, the Instagram audience is a big catch for outlets trying to attract millennials.

Yet, American news outlets have been less enthusiastic to jump on board than with other social platforms like Facebook or Twitter. The New York Times, for example, didn’t start their Instagram account until just over a year ago, which was already four years behind the app’s launch.

The hesitance, according an article from the American Journalism Review, stems from questions of connection and exposure. Instagram posts don’t link, which makes it hard for news outlets to draw social users back to their home sites. Instead of using the platform just for clicks, AJR found that news publishers are using the app to promote their brand among the 400 million Instagram users who might not otherwise see their content.

“Instagram is just not a traffic driver,” USA Today’s Mary Nahorniak told AJR last year. “That’s not why we’re on Instagram. We’re on Instagram to reach people in a new and different way.”

Of the top 100 brands in the world, 90 have an Instagram presence, according to an annual review of Instagram done by social analytics blog Simply Measured.

“Instagram has gone from nice-to-have to need-to-have for social media marketers,” Simply Measured blogger Kevin Shively explains in a blog.

Of the brands studied, only one was a traditional news outlet:Thomson Reuters. In the 30-day trial period, Reuters grew it’s Instagram audience 15.6 percent per day.

The apparent lesson for news outlets? A new audience is out there for those who join Instagram, then post, and post often.

As mobile continues to rise as a dominant news channel, and the rise in social-media news consumption follows (according to the 2015 Digital News Report compiled by the Reuters Institute), it’s imperative that news outlets innovate constantly to keep engaging that audience.

Below are three ways that news outlets could harness that challenge using Instagram:

Instagram-specific content:

In the last year, New York Magazine has more than doubled it’s Instagram following.

The company launched an ambitious Instagram last year, complete with a social-graphics Slack channel and a new tool for social media producers to build their own graphics.

Their strategy is to push social media posts that “supplement a story’s larger narrative,” social media editor Nate Goldman said in an article:

“That kind of effort resulted in a mini-package that stands well on its own, while also adding to a reader’s understanding of the project as a whole, should they be inspired to dive further in.”

Adding depth to the heavily visual package of their product, the magazine has started a collection of “audiograms” (photos with playable audio) as part of their strategy. (The photos they post are also absolutely top notch).

Judging by their climb from 190,000 followers to 475,000 in the space of a year, their strategy seems to be working.

Interactive Experiences:

Interactive Instagram adventures are another storytelling method taking flight on the social platform. Typically, these adventures involve a series of profiles and posts linked through tags, that take the reader through a game-like experience. They can be used as a choose-your-own adventure type scenario, as a way for user-generated content to be integrated in storytelling and news gathering and for explanatory step-by-step education. And they’re awesome.

So far, these games have been used to advertise TV shows, video games, and nonprofit causes — but nobody has used them yet for journalism. The potential in these experiences is enormous.

Games:

For International Day for Mine Awareness this year (April 4), the United Nations tried something new to help educate their global audience about the dangers of landmines. They built a game. On Instagram.

To play, you click from the main page onto a traditional minesweeper game, then navigate from one screen to the next using tags. If you lose, you’re redirected to the picture of the victim of a landmine, and more tags that encourage you to donate to learn more or donate to the relief fund.

Using games to do journalism (that is, to convey information that helps people better understand the world), is not a novel idea. As ProPublica’s SiSi Wei wrote in 2013, games “guide players to feel emotion and conflict, as well as learn the intricacies of complex subjects and systems. They engage users in a highly meaningful, memorable and influential way.”

What better way to adopt this strategy than reaching out to millions of new viewers where they already are? I mean Instagram, of course.

Choose Your Own Adventure Narratives:

For a rough example of how this could work, take a click through the choose-your-own adventure narrative that an ad agency built around the book Thirteen by Tom Hoyle. On any of the screens, there is a “Tap to See Options” button, which leads you to choices that lead you through the narrative.

Similar to the ProPublica journalism-video games, choose your own adventure narratives have also been used to explain complex processes in a journalistic fashion. Take, for example, the choose-your-own tax scheme game built by ICIJ to explain the Panama Papers. Clicking through the process of offshore banking as a soccer star, politician and business executive is an awesome way to learn about the process. I just wonder how many new readers the consortium would have if it had also presented that experience on Instagram, instead of only on it’s website.

User-Contributed Interactives:

If you’re looking for new ideas done earlier, more efficiently, and probably cheaper than you could manage on your own, search no farther than Ikea. I’m not talking about their furniture.

In 2014, Ikea released a catalog built entirely on Instagram using the tagging methods mentioned above. Beyond the strategies mentioned above, their design included a tagging feature that allowed users to submit pictures of their own Ikea furniture to a specific account.

Some news outlets have already embraced this idea. For example, The Chicago Tribune routinely does call-outs to it’s audience asking for content to be submitted under a particular hashtag (like the photo below).

What’s special about the Ikea idea is that it’s a comprehensive part of a package they’ve put together already — allowing users to be a part of the final product. They can link from their magazine directly to a group of audience photos that they have control over.

In sum: Instagram could be a really cool tool for outlets looking to boost their interactivity on social (something that’s nearly impossible to do on Facebook and Twitter). Advertising firms have already jumped on the bandwagon. And regardless of the growing Snapchat craze, it’s time newsrooms did too.

P.S: Here’s a Neil Shae post that should convince even social media skeptics that moving and powerful journalism can be done with only a photo and a few paragraphs of elegant reporting.