Leave it to Kim Kardashian, app mogul and social media virtuoso, to ignite a traffic explosion from the last place anyone expected.
A recent cover story about Kardashian in GQ generated a record number of referrals from Instagram, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jim Nelson, told Digiday on Tuesday. In layman’s terms: A whole lot of people found Caity Weaver’s article through the image-sharing service, and that’s kind of remarkable.
“We saw 360,000 referrals coming through Instagram, a platform almost unanimously known for not generating referral traffic,” Nelson told Digiday. “For the first time, Instagram eclipsed Facebook as our top referrer for this story.”
Instagram doesn’t let users click on links in comments posted under pictures, which makes it hard for businesses to leverage the platform for traffic. Instead, businesses are encouraged to purchase ads that display inline on an individual’s feed.
GQ, like many outlets, skirts this issue by including links in its Instagram profile ― which users can click on. When it was promoting Weaver’s story on Kardashian, the magazine linked to the article in its Instagram profile.
Simple enough recipe: Mix awesome pictures of a gorgeous, brilliant woman with killer writing, and who could resist?
Normally, this might not even be newsworthy. But the media is currently in the throes of yet another algorithm change from Facebook, the social media giant that owns Instagram. That shift means less traffic to publishers from the biggest of all social networks ― and that means panic for people who rely on web traffic for revenue.
The lesson? Social media can still connect people to content. It might just take a little creativity to get them there.
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