Mustang News: Getting out of a Rut using IG Stories

Even with our killer new Instagram Story strategy, Mustang News Instagram Story viewership began to plateau. As it turns out, reaching new audience members is more challenging on Instagram than on Facebook or Twitter because of one thing Instagram lacks: the share button. People were loving our new content and consuming it regularly, but because (a.) Instagram makes it kind of hard to share content, and (b.) we never included any kind of call to action or incentive to share our content, our content was reaching new audiences at snail speed.

We needed some fun, less “news-y” viral content in our lives.

The great thing about having college students that all attend the same university as your most prevalent target audience is that they all operate on a very similar schedule. This allowed us to create timely, hyper-relatable that, you guessed it, got shared, shared, and shared some more. Our finals week emoji challenge even got shared in the feeds of students on the East Coast, as they were having their finals at the same time (nothing like shared trauma to unite people, am I right?).

We started brainstorming, developing and ultimately posting this engagement-centric content on a weekly basis. Followers could expect a horoscope or emoji challenge one week, trivia the next, and even a giveaway every now and then. This high-engagement, entertainment-centric content gave us a boost of momentum every time it was published, as it allowed our content to reach new audience members. The new audience members came for the fun stuff, but stayed for the important news stuff.