Singapore’s main newspaper Straits Times is now on Instagram

Dawn

February 14, 2014

A week after we wrote that Straits Times has jumped onto the Pinterest bandwagon, the biggest English newspaper in Singapore announced that it is now also on popular photo sharing app Instagram.

We're now on #Instagram! Follow us @Straits_Times http://t.co/jrLl5Npi93 pic.twitter.com/Dg5YBDLrag

— The Straits Times (@straits_times) February 13, 2014

The Straits Times Instagram profile reads: “A curation of photos and videos from The Straits Times and a behind-the-scenes look of our newsroom at work”.

For those unfamiliar with Instagram, it is the number one photo sharing app in the world, with over 75 million users around the world using it everyday. Because of its hyper fast growth, Facebook decided to acquire the company in April 2012 at a reported price tag of US$1 Billion. Other than online photo-sharing, users can also take videos, apply digital filters to them, and share them on a variety of social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr.

As we previously wrote, the move to focus its resource to Pinterest and now Instagram shows that Straits Times is leveraging on various online channels to harness Internet traffic where there are a lot of users. It could also be a means to increase engagement and create more conversations with its readers.

The decision to ramp up its online activities come shortly after Appetite Magazine, one of Singapore’s main food magazine, announced that it will be discontinuing its print magazine from February onwards.

Singapore Press Holdings, the city state’s largest print publisher, also the parent company behind Straits Times has also suffered a fall in advertising and circulation revenue in the third fiscal quarter of 2013 – despite posting an 81 per cent increase in net profit.