Irish Times finds instant engagement on Instagram
Ideas Blog | 20 January 2025
As the social media landscape continues shifting, news media companies often find themselves scrambling to find new ways to effectively reach audiences. At The Irish Times, that led to going all in on a new strategy using visual design formats to appeal to its Instagram audience.
The audience team wanted to reach new readers while engaging its existing audience and improving conversions, but it was seeing its social traffic decline overall. The team targeted Instagram as its social media platform of choice for a new strategy, as Facebook had begun downgrading news posts and X was becoming increasingly volatile.
Defining goals
To build greater engagement, the team defined its objectives as acquiring onsite engagement, not just quick click-throughs, and it targeted users who were younger, female, and less engaged. Early in the process, the KPIs it identified were to grow its number of followers, grow its reach, and grow the interactions with its content.
To do this, it created a new visual strategy to catch the attention of fast-scrolling readers. Not only did it use striking new imagery, but the team expanded the breadth of the content being covered.
Whilst The Irish Times is known for its news coverage, the team wanted to redefine that news-centric perception by covering stories that younger audiences would find interesting — such as sports, crime, human interest, and topics that affected them directly, like the housing crisis.
The final part of the strategy was to study the cadence of the posts made to determine the number of posts that worked best. The team carried out experiments on volume as well as which times were most effective in achieving maximum engagement and building habit amongst users.
Creating new approaches
Amongst the things that worked well for the team were:
Adding closed captions — which has since become an expectation for audiences — helped keep users engaged. The team used a non-Instagram tool for the captioning, which allowed broader language access (e.g., Irish words and names).
Using high-quality video. To capitalise on Instagram’s increased focus on reels, the audience team adapted The Irish Times’s long-form video to short, 90-second clips.
Promoting evergreen content. Taking a “best of” approach allowed the team to repromote some of its best work and keep audiences engaged. For example, its Top Stories of 2023 during the holidays yielded some of its best-performing posts, and an interview with Cillian Murphy captured 171,000 views.
Curated content. To meet its goal of building habit amongst users, the team introduced a daily curated list of key stories that enjoyed a high level of engagement.
One of the most popular features in the print version of The Irish Times is its Letters to Editors, and the audience team leaned into that popularity, creating a digital version for Instagram that focused on quirky, touching, or provocative letters.
Additionally, with more than 160 years of archived materials, The Irish Times audience team had a wealth of history to work with. It hand-picked engaging archive pieces to show users what they could find in its archives and then created an Instagram guide to using it.
How it worked
The team hoped to use this campaign to grow the newspaper’s readership and expand its audience.
The results were impressive, with the total reach on Instagram growing 51% in 2023 and organic reach growing by 100%. The platform enjoyed a sharp increase in every area, with content interaction, link clicks, and impressions doubling and the number of followers growing by 13%.
The success of the campaign belongs not only to the strategic and innovative approaches taken by the audience team but to the high-quality visuals created to showcase The Irish Times’s journalism and set it apart from competitors.