Newspapers and Instagram: Why and How Newspapers Should Use Instagram

By Ashley Alexander  

Launched in 2010, Instagram has over 700 million monthly users and three times more engagement than its parent company, Facebook. Celebrities using the platform have tens of millions of followers; brands that are on it receive hundreds of thousands of likes. Despite seeing424 percent year to year growth in engagement, the largest engagement increase of any platform, less than 40 percent of newspapers are on Instagram.

So, what’s stopping newspapers from hopping on the platform’s bandwagon?Here are a couple things that could be holding them back:

First and foremost,no live links = no traffic driven:

Instagram only allows active links in the user’s profile bio. This means links don’t work in captions, comments, etc. and therefore won’t be effective in those locations. For an organization whose main products are news stories, this type of content isn’t received as well on the platform. News…