Inside Joe Media’s new Instagram strategy

Its social content reaches hundreds of millions of people every month, telling the human stories behind the headlines.

Instagram was a strategic focus due to its popularity among its target 18-34 demographic. And so Joe devised a specific strategy for growth on Instagram, with a goal to treat it like a standalone outlet with its own aesthetic and content formats, and to encourage its audience to engage deeply with Joe content on the platform.

This differs from the traditional strategy towards platforms like Facebook, where referral traffic has always been a key objective. As a result, it now has more verticals on Instagram than any other social platform. Its flagship Joe has 1 million followers, making it one of the most followed news accounts in the UK, while is sports accounts are among the most engaged in the world. FootballJoe has 2.3 million followers, RugbyJoe has 436,000, GamingJoe 376,000, FightJoe 360,000 and PoliticsJoe 38,900. Its following grew 40% in the last quarter, with a significantly above average engagement rate of over 5%.

Overall, its reach on Instagram has gone from 50 million in April 2021 to 73 million – an increase of over 37%. A significant amount of that is driven by its ability to utilize the app’s different spaces, from Reels to image/video carousels, IGTVs and interactive Story polls. For example, it used the Instagram Carousel in the wake of the outrage over Molly Mae Hague’s ‘24 hours’ speech, which reached 194,000 accounts, and for the ‘Putin’s villain origin story’ Carousel it did at the start of the Ukraine invasion.

Tackling important stories

This year, Joe Media reported from the refugee camps in northern France, with its team visiting Grande Synthe where it spoke to young people including several Afghans who had fled their homeland since the Taliban took power in August 2021. The video report, titled ‘It’s England or Die’, has had 270,000 views across its social platforms. The accompanying article had almost 178,000 page views.

It also conducted viral interviews with top politicians such as Rory Stewart and Jacob Rees Mogg. It spoke to the former about the withdrawal of UK forces from Afghanistan. Clever titling across the different platforms ensured this video reached as wide an audience as possible. For example, the title on YouTube (where the long-form has 264,256 views) is ‘MP that walked across Afghanistan reacts to the fall of Kabul’.

On Twitter, where it has 250,000 views, the team clipped it into three videos of just over three minutes duration and titled it with a more politically engaged audience in mind.

With Jacob Rees Mogg, it doorstepped him at Tory Party conference and captured him responding to a disability campaigner. That footage was used across BBC News and had 2.3m views on Twitter alone.

Unlike other publishers, its aim isn’t to drive audiences away from social media to our platforms – it delivers the news to them where they are. As well as serving the audience, this strategy also boosts engagement across channels. As a by-product of this strategy, it is now also benefiting from Linkinbio referral traffic, which has grown by 89% over the past six months to become our third biggest social traffic driver.

This project was a winner at The Drum Awards for Online Media 2022. Check out which of The Drum Awards are currently open for entry.