Instagram growing in importance for publishers, says Echobox

A new survey conducted by Echobox shows that 83% of respondents believe that Instagram will occupy a more important place in their overall publishing strategy this year. Other top priorities for 2022 include newsletters, with 40% of respondents saying that they intend to increase the total number of newsletters they offer.

Results are likely to skew towards reach-frequency strategies over those formed primarily around reader revenues, since the majority of respondents came from news publishers and within them, those working in management or social media roles. 

However, with 30 publishers from 17 global markets included in the study, the findings make for interesting reading.    

Of the options given, the most commonly cited priority for respondents in 2022 was traffic growth, with 3 in 4 publishers saying that their largest focus is increasing traffic. The other two most common priorities were shown to be growing social followers and engagement (57%) and improving the quality of published content (50%).

Other key findings include:

• New content formats will continue to play a vital role in publishers’ engagement strategies, with video content, newsletters and audio content playing a more important role this year for 63%, 43% and 33% of publishers respectively.
• One-quarter of publishers who don’t yet offer any newsletters at all plan to launch at least one this year.
• The greatest challenges for publishers in 2021 were fighting against declining traffic (47%), staying ahead of the Facebook algorithm (40%) and growing digital subscriptions (37%).

Antoine Amann, CEO of Echobox, said: “After two years of lockdowns and a transformative period for many publishers, traffic growth remains a fundamental area of focus for newsrooms around the world. With the majority of publishers surveyed indicating that automation will play an even more critical role this year, it’s clear that publishers believe automation to be a powerful tool in their arsenal for generating traffic and audience engagement.”

You can access the full results here.