How The Economist attracts readers with Instagram

Liv Moloney, head of social media for The Economist, writes about how it uses Instagram to attract readers.

Moloney writes, “Over the past year, Instagram has become essential to the growth of our business and a true shop window for our best journalism. The platform’s link-in-bio feature, which enables us to link directly to individual pages, has driven several million referrals to our Web site and a marked uplift in subscriptions and registrations.

“We’ve also expanded into more news-responsive Instagram stories, as well as our regular biweekly offering, to generate referrals through swipe-ups. In December 2021, Instagram brought more article-generated subscriptions than any other social media platform for the first time, overtaking Facebook, and hundreds of thousands of referrals to our Web site.

“We have also used Instagram to make news of our own. Our regularly updated excess-deaths tracker was frequently cited by other organisations as a guide to the true death toll of the pandemic.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.