Why Instagram Is Not for Journalism
Instagram has been a social media site gaining a little bit of traction for the past couple years. It has gained many users, while some other social media sites have decreased.
The station I have chosen for this project is KGTV from San Diego. The station I am covering for my semester long project (KGUN 9) is not on Instagram (can you blame them?). KGTV has over seven thousand followers as the photo above shows.
They are using Instagram as a tease for certain stories and also a promotional tool for certain things. One of the promos/tease is the Oscar tease below:
The “excitement” does not appear present at all because there is not a lot of interaction going on between the page and its viewers, but it is a nice promo piece for the news station!
The interaction between the Instagram page and their viewers seems to be only if there is an issue with a post. The fact they rarely reply, combined with other reasons lead me to believe it is not even necessary to have an Instagram.
Let’s shift gears a bit. KGTV’s Facebook page interactions and engagement is excellent compared to the Instagram page.
Thinking about the 7.4k followers they have, how many of them are on Facebook? Well, only a mere 235,191 people like their Facebook page so chances are it is very likely many of the 7.4k followers are on Facebook.
Now I am going to ask you, “Which one are you going to prefer to use to generate page views, a page with 235,191 fans or 7,455 fans?”
I think the answer is pretty simple, you would most likely go with the 235,191 fans.
According to recent article from the Washington Post, there are over 1.3 billion people on Facebook. This number is the same amount of people in China! Compare the Facebook numbers to the mere 400 million on Instagram, it is around 1/3 of the audience. This means a majority of the station’s Instagram fans, could also already be fans of the page on Facebook which means you are targeting an audience you already have.
This means as a Social Media Coordinator, you are targeting a specific audience and you want them to go back to your main website. The only way to generate advertising revenue is by linking the Instagram account back to the webpage. Now in the photo below, I circled the ONLY place where the link is to their main page:
Now, if I was a Social Media Coordinator, I would be cringing at the thought there is only one place for a link to the homepage. Not only that, but having only 7,455 fans means a lot less interaction and engagement then Facebook.
This means two things, limited traffic to the website which leads to limited increase for advertisement revenue. The link in the bio is one of the positives over Snapchat. However, Snapchat does have a specific age range which should be targeted more by news companies, 18–25, but we digress.
When it comes to Instagram, KGTV does post the occasional photos which appeal to many people. These two photos of the Blood Moon are the only user generated content on their Instagram:
It generated quite a good amount of traction on Instagram, however most of the likes were from random people who were not following the account. This brings up the predicament: how do you know you are truly improving your page views from this or even engagement when it seems as if not many people are commenting on the posts? The answer is you will not notice much of a change in page viewers or even engagement. Yes, the teases could work for the show, but I find using social media to tease a show is tacky. There is just no need to tease a show if your newsroom and yourself produce excellent content.
Now relating this back to the ideology of using Instagram for story telling, it would not work. How are you supposed to be able to tell a story on social media without losing revenue from your advertising partners? You cannot because you posted the story on social media instead of your website which means there will be no advertisement revenue.
Relating this back to myself, when I am using Instagram, I only go for certain things which appeal to me. I could assume everyone else is the same way, but for this assignment, I will not. I use Instagram to show some cool pictures I have taken, and look at cool pictures taken by other people. Ex:
Other than showing off some of my work, I use it for checking out how some of my fellow photographers’ pages are doing, like Nat Geo. I have no real use for following a news company or station on Instagram. It seems as if their posts are all just a tease or a promo for their show, but that is just what I have found. The last thing I will say is: How many of you reading this follow a news company on Instagram for their information they post?
