With 1 billion users worldwide, Instagram is 6th most popular social platform according to Statista and Hootsuit, after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat.

While Facebook remains the biggest source of social traffic for most publishers, Instagram’s referral traffic is growing fast. Once an account reaches 10,000 followers, you can embed links into Stories, driving real traffic to your website.

How can publishers get the most from Instagram? We interviewed Mathias Jørgensen, Head of Audience Development at VG, one of the most popular digital publishers in Norway and a Schibsted brand. 

When did your team start to actively focus on Instagram?
We have been publishing on Instagram for a long time, but our current strategy was created last fall.

Why did you decide to focus on Instagram?
Instagram is one of the growing social media platforms in Norway, and like with other social media platforms, VG wants to be present where our users are.

Instagram is currently not a big driver of traffic to our own platforms, but a tool to raise awareness of our journalism and build the VG brand.

We have currently two different strategies on Instagram, where the normal feed is for building the brand and engagement, while on stories we also focus on driving traffic.

How is your approach different from working with other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Snapchat?
While Facebook is mainly a traffic driver these days, Instagram is more about building the VG brand.

How do you benchmark your performance on Instagram?
We look at engagement, views and clicks back to our own platforms.

What’s your take on working with influencers on Instagram?
VG has several influencers/celebrities attached to them through VGTV, and a lot of the total traffic back to VG from Instagram comes from their personal accounts that have hundreds of thousands of followers.
We’re also very aware of the effect of tagging and mentioning other influencers in our posts and stories to further spread our content to their followers.