Company: New York Public Library
Campaign: Insta Novels
Agency: Mother
Duration: August 2018-ongoing
How does a library grow its social media presence—and convert those new followers into active patrons? For the New York Public Library, the answer came via the Insta Novel: full-length classics like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Metamorphosis, shared in illustrated, bite-sized chunks through Instagram’s Stories tool.
Strategy
The New York Public Library wanted to make great works of literature more widely—and digitally—available. So creative agency Mother pitched the idea of connecting with prospective new readers where they already were: Instagram. The Story, a type of temporary 24-hour post introduced to the platform just two years earlier, presented an original means to capture attention and lend a sense of immediacy to the reading process.
Tactics
Aware of the challenges in promoting plain text content on an image-first platform, the team tapped illustrators like Magoz and César Pelizer to enliven the stories with colorful, animated artwork that’s functional as well as eye-catching: a thumb rest at the bottom right corner of each digital page allows the reader to hold the screen open for as long as needed, evading Story’s standard 15-second duration.
With an eye towards the long-term reading experience, @nypl also archives all Stories in their dedicated Highlight section. Currently, visitors to the page can read A Christmas Carol, The Metamorphosis, The Yellow Wallpaper, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by clicking on the appropriately titled bubble.
Results
As of April 2019, @nypl has increased its Instagram followers count by more than 145k—for a total of more than 349k—in the eight months since the Insta Novel’s debut on August 22, 2018, almost five times the number of followers acquired during the year preceding the campaign’s debut.
Forbes in October 2018 reported 40,000 completed reads of debut Insta Novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, while Eye on Design in that same month highlighted the program’s success in converting Instagram users to patrons, noting that more than 6,700 viewers had accessed NYPL’s SimplyE reading app via its link in the @nypl Instagram bio and 1,253 of those users had subsequently downloaded the app.
And the campaign hasn’t gone unrecognized by the digital awards circuit: in April 2019, the Insta Novels project won all three Webby Awards for which it was nominated—Best Use of Stories, Education & Discovery (Social), and the People’s Voice for Best Use of Social Media (Advertising, Media & PR).