Audience + Social
At the Hartford Courant, I am constantly repurposing our digital content for Instagram, leveraging its native features like Story polls, quizzes, and the open-ended question tool to engage our followers, act as a resource for them, and build relationships. Our posts put the news into context through still graphics delivering headlines and visually representing other information in a way that’s easy to understand. Below are some of the efforts I am particularly proud of.
Coronavirus Q&A IGTV Series
As the coronavirus pandemic continued, we received lots of questions across all of our platforms. While I answered many through IG DMs and tried to connect people with resources there, we also wanted to provide a quick, visual way to package answers to frequently asked questions. We created a weekly IGTV series where reporters spoke directly and clearly about the most recent COVID news our audience wanted to know. When the series started, it didn’t get as much engagement as expected. Upon focusing on topic-specific questions for each video, like schools and restaurants, our engagement grew up to 2,000 views each week and had a steady increase in saves and shares.
Bringing our social audience to the site
At the end of 2020, I wanted to create a space for our audience to connect with us on a human level and tell us what they learned that year. I posted an IG Story asking just that and responded to the DMs, asking if they wanted their answers to be included in an online story. The Story replies ended up being an amazing, organic opportunity to chat directly with our followers and share our reflections for the end of 2020. After sharing the article with each of them, I noticed an uptick in those specific followers’ engagement with our content. View the online story here.
Quizzing our audience on the news
In an effort to deliver the news and engage our audience in a different way, I used IG’s native quiz feature to highlight stories regarding COVID-19 and elections. We received positive audience feedback in DMs, and even got a few suggestions on topics for future quizzes.
Experimenting with Close Friends content
As I continue to build relationships with our audience, I decided to experiment with more exclusive content for our top engagers. After sharing that we’d provide multi-slide IG Stories explaining more than just the headlines, video explainers directly from our reporters, and inside looks at our newsletter content, we posted a poll asking for participants to opt-in. In the first week, we gained close to 700 Close Friends.
To gain more subscribers to the Courant’s Five Things You Need To Know newsletter, we’ve experimented with trivia questions, where the winner gets a shoutout in the next day’s newsletter, and even polls asking what stories our audience thinks should go in the newsletter.