As any other timely and relevant news source does, HuffPost has no shortage of social media platforms to follow. Last week, I explored and reviewed their twitter presence. For my blog post this week, I decided to look at another facet of HuffPost’s social media: their Instagram.
Much like their twitter account, HuffPost’s Instagram begins with one, larger umbrella account that covers all of their main news stories for the day. In addition to the main account, HuffPost has seven sub-accounts each with content catering to a specific audience.
The main HuffPost account has 1.9 million followers. This number is somewhat comparable to other news media pages such as the Times, Fox, and CNN; although they all had around 5 million or more. So, HuffPost is definitely a significant presence on Instagram, but maybe not quite on the same level as its competitors. As for the sub-accounts, HuffPost Women is the most popular with around 650 thousand followers. The others have a similar number, give or take a few hundred thousand.
As for the overall aesthetics of the page, the images were of course well-shot and clear. However, most of the pictures have some sort of headline, caption, or quote in the image itself. I found this to be distracting and obtrusive to the image. In addition to the text on the image, all of the pictures had detailed captions. I understand wanting to make the viewer quickly understand the context of the image but I think there’s something to be said for conforming to each platform for its own merit. Instagram is an image based platform, and I personally thought that it would benefit them to capitalize a bit more on that to help differentiate from their other social media platforms. Also, while most of the images had the text on picture, there were a few that did not. The lack of uniformity made the page look less professional in my opinion.
Overall, I think HuffPost has an effective Instagram presence. The account has around 3-5 posts per day, which is a reasonable amount given the nature of Instagram. I found the division of their accounts to be a nice feature, making it easier for specific viewers to find information that’s directly relevant to them. I would suggest them being more uniform with their images but that’s a bit more subjective on my part.
Huffington Post Tracker 