The Day Newspaper Instagram Revamp
Skills: Research, Critical Thinking, Social Media Planning, Sketching, Prototyping, Social Media Management.
Tools: Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Express, Meta Business Suite
Timeline: Summer 2023
The Problem
I spent the summer of 2023 as an intern at The Day Newspaper in New London, CT. In this position, I had the pleasure of working as a photojournalist for them, contributing coverage to over 20 stories. In addition to this role, I was also asked to work on certain aspects of their social media.
The specific project I was tasked with tackling was the organization’s Instagram account. Prior to my arrival, the team at The Day was barely using Instagram. They posted once or twice every week and were not pushing people to the content on their website which would allow them to make money.
The problem was that nobody on the team knew how to effectively use the platform to advertise their stories. They were in desperate need of a workflow to create more constructive posts which allowed for more engagement with followers. Ultimately, they needed to learn to intrigue their audience enough go to The Day’s website and pay for a subscription.
Objective
The goal for this summer was to create an easy-to-follow system for the employees at The Day to follow to maintain their Instagram account after the completion of my internship. This would include graphic templates, a brief media plan, and guidebook with step-by-step instructions and tips/tricks.
Research
To understand the type of content that The Day would be posting to Instagram, I completed a competitor analysis to observe what the largest and most successful news organizations were doing. Some competitors included The Associated Press, The New York Times, Fox News, CNN, and The Boston Globe. The following insights were found from the competitor analysis:
Eye catching headlines posted with alongside a photo perform the best for news organizations.
Linking to stories is crucial, both on the page’s story and in their bio.
Captions should give enough information to intrigue readers, but not enough that they feel they don’t need to read the full article.
Sketches
Based off of the strategies seen on other accounts, I began sketching versions of a post template. Out of the sketches, I decided on pick 3 of the versions to design in order to allow for a variety of posts on the Instagram.
Templates
I started the design process in Adobe InDesign in order to give myself the most flexibility possible when creating these templates. I created the different versions of an Instagram post. Using a recent story the paper had published, I created mockups to allow the employees at The Day to effectively visualize the post on their feed.
After receiving approval for the three templates, I recreated them in Adobe Express as this was the most accessible program for them. In addition, I created templates for Story posts to be used as well.
Testing & Reevaluation
After the completion of all templates in Adobe Express, I began posting daily on the page to test different strategies for The Day. Throughout the course of the summer, I experimented and made a final evaluation of best practices at the completion of the internship.
Conclusion
At the completion of my time at The Day, the Instagram had grown exponentially. Impressions on the page grew by 257% and post interactions increased by 109%. These stats show that more people are seeing the organization’s posts, and they are interacting with them.
An additional statistic that is significant for The Day is that external link taps increased by 1,182%. This means that links to stories posted on the page were being tapped far more often than before.
These statistics prove that the efforts and strategies I created for The Day showed significant improvement over their previous strategy. In order to ensure that these practices continued after I completed my internship, I created a 38-page Instagram Guide for them to use. This guide includes basic information to explain why they should use Instagram, best practices, and tips for posting, and a step-by-step guide of how to use the social media templates.
