The big picture: 2020 has been a perfect storm for this change: The pandemic put an end to all the fun that users typically posted, while also creating a pressing need for reliable health information.
- The information ecosystems on Twitter and Facebook are well entrenched, leaving many people — particularly the younger-skewing Instagram crowd — to seek a new place to operate. And then in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor's killings, it was primed not just for information, but activism.
"Instagram felt like a place for a clean, fresh start," Mosheh Oinounou, a digital consultant and former TV news producer, tells Axios.
- Oinounou over the past few months has created an informational Instagram, pulling in all of the latest headlines, numbers and fact checks about the pandemic.
- "The summer of 2020 has been a time where Instagram Stories especially seem like a place where people are increasingly turning to charts, infographics, quotes and headlines because they feel overwhelmed by the news," he said.
By the numbers: Accounts that have leaned into this trend have seen their growth skyrocket.
Larger publishers are also benefittingfrom the trend. @ProPublica, which had already been posting text-centric information, saw 70% follower growth in the last 6 months, almost all coming since the onset of the pandemic in mid-March, according to CrowdTangle data.
- This trend is altering publisher strategy as well: Refinery29 (2.4m followers) went from 41% text-based info posts in January to 72% in July, according to an Axios analysis, while Business Insider (2.3m) went from 5% to 48%.
Between the lines: A key shift in how information on Instagram spreads came in mid-2018, when the app allowed users to share posts from the feed to their Stories, unlocking a 1-to-many share mechanism that allowed posts to get massive audiences.
- Instagrams doesn't have a traditional share button to drive virality like other major social networks.
- "That feature has been integral to the way that this information is able to travel," says Jen Winston who runs the progressive, info-centric @jenerous.
What to watch: As information and opinion become a bigger part of the Instagram experience, it could run into the same problems with disinformation that have plagued other major social networks — including Facebook, which owns Instagram.
