There’s no end in sight for publishers’ interest in Instagram, now that it is bringing more and more social traffic.

Having talked with VG from Norway and their brand-focused strategy, we turned to Spain’s largest television network – Mediaset.
Social Media Manager Sonia Got Leibar shared her insights into how they approach Instagram.

When did your team start to actively focus on Instagram?
We began to publish with a certain regularity in March 2015.

Why did you decide to focus on Instagram?
We thought that Instagram was a good place to create communities of fans for different  channels, programs, TV series and celebrities.

What did you hope to get out of it?
In the beginning, our only goal was to create those communities of fans and have a communication channel with them.
Today this is still our main goal but Instagram as a traffic referrer has become a very relevant actor. That has been a big surprise: we did not expect that links were going to perform so well.

How is your approach different from working with other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, or Snapchat?
We had a brief experience with Snapchat before Instagram Stories appeared, but we are not working on Snapchat nowadays.

Comparing to the rest of social platforms, on Instagram:

• We feel more free. Instagram is a platform where you can be more creative, especially on Stories. Plus, Instagram is a friendly platform where we are not so afraid of haters and we have greater confidence to post more provocative content.
• We dedicate more time to each post. That creativity and the fact that it’s necessary to work on mobile devices obliges us to spend more time publishing on Instagram.

How do you benchmark your performance on Instagram?
We measure three main KPIs:

• Followers: This could sound too simple but we are very conscious that we are living now through the big growth of Instagram. We experienced this already on Facebook years ago. After a period of time these huge increases in followers stop and you have to work with the community you managed to create. So we work to grow our communities as much as we can on Instagram right now.
• Reach/Interactions: These two features are related since there is an algorithmic newsfeed on Instagram too. We try to create content that encourages interactions.
• Web traffic: One year ago we started seeing specific content with more traffic coming from Instagram than from Facebook or Google. Today, we have one entire site, mtmad.es, whose main traffic source is Instagram every month.

What has *not* worked for you on Instagram?
To be boring or to be too beautiful. It’s not always about posting the prettiest picture of a sunset, it’s about posting something that touches your followers or makes them laugh.

What’s your take on working with influencers or celebrities on Instagram?
Instagram is absolutely their platform. In most of the cases it’s the only social media account that celebrities are managing all by themselves, directly from their phones.
We work very closely with them, especially on @mtmad.es, our online video platform. Our influencers share the links to their videos on their own Instagram accounts.

What’s the number one thing you’d advise other publishers to pay attention to on Instagram?
I don’t feel very comfortable giving advices to colleagues that I’m sure are doing an excellent job but if I had to choose one thing to pay special attention it will be: be aware of losing long term followers. What works today may not work anymore tomorrow so we need to be very flexible checking every day our followers’ behaviour.