What we’ve learned as we grow Sioux Falls Simplified’s social presence

Makayla Voris is a 2025 RJI Student Innovation Fellow partnered with Sioux Falls Simplified. The RJI Student Innovation Fellows will be sharing their innovative work throughout the summer in Innovation in Focus.

Social media can be a wacky place — often we’re at the mercy of algorithms and trends that change every few weeks. This summer, Megan Raposa, founder of Sioux Falls Simplified (SFS), and I started to work on growing SFS’s Instagram and LinkedIn presence. 

At the base level, the goal was to draw in more subscribers to the newsletter. We wanted to foster more engagement. The hope is that the content would encourage people to subscribe by visiting the link in our bio. 

For Instagram specifically, we wanted to get to 3,000 followers by mid-June. That meant getting almost 100 people to the page. To do this, we created Instagram reels. 

For LinkedIn, we wanted to get more content on the page and get the follower count up from 61. To do this, we started posting the carousels that we post on Facebook and Instagram — which summarize the highlights of each newsletter – and tagging organizations in sponsored content. 

For these experiments, we used Canva Pro to edit vertical video and MetaBusiness Suite to track analytics. We used LinkedIn’s built in analytics platform to track things there. 

Instagram 

We took two avenues with Instagram Reels. One was to create “promotional” videos for sponsored stories. We would edit video clips taken by Megan Raposa or myself. 

After putting the videos together, we would add trending audio by editing the reel in Instagram. Usually, there’s a tab as you edit reels that ranks audio by how often it has been used in videos. Finally, we would create a caption that tagged the organization at the center of the story. 

A great example of this is a reel we filmed of us training Rocky-style for South Dakota’s Laziest Race, hosted by The Compass Center. According to MetaBusiness Suite, it’s our third most-viewed content with 2.4K views, 70 likes and six reposts. 

To make sure this got into peoples’ algorithms, we made use of trending audio and hashtags.  

Another direction we took was creating a series called #ThoughtfulTuesdays. Each Tuesday, when there is a lull in social media posting, we’ll post a video with a question that followers can answer in the comments. 

One #ThoughfulTuesday in particular has over 1,000 views, with 35% of these being non-followers, and 34 comments. The question was “What is a place you always take your out-of-town friends when they visit Sioux Falls?”  We even received a direct message from a new follower saying that the video was a helpful resource to them because they were new to Sioux Falls.

Since May 26, Sioux Falls Simplified’s Instagram page has received 165 followers and we reached our 3,000 follower goal on July 4.

Both experiments have not gone on long enough for us to say that these are definitive growth strategies long term. Tagging seems to work only if the organizations repost the content, comments or if the content happens to be pop-culturally relevant (see our axolotl and Great Plains Zoo reel here.) We plan to continue doing intentional collaborations in the future.   

Our #ThoughtfulTuesday series seems hit or miss so far. The current hypothesis is that questions must be focused on Sioux Falls and be easily answerable – if an answer doesn’t come to viewers’ minds at once, they don’t seem to engage. 

But it does get views/interaction, so we won’t abandon ship quite yet! Three of our #ThoughtfulTuesday videos are our top ten videos in terms of reach. The lowest reach was 504 accounts. 

LinkedIn

We took the same tagging approach on sponsored stories to LinkedIn. Tagged content usually received between 16 and 30 impressions. We started posting the content carousels that sum up our weekly newsletter on Facebook and Instagram on LinkedIn as well. This creates consistency in our posting. 

Something that got a lot more eyes on our page was when Raposa announced we would be posting more content on the SFS LinkedIn or when she posted about the RJI Fellowship. Raposa’s involvement in the Sioux Falls community as both a reporter and entrepreneur goes far with getting eyeballs on the LinkedIn page. 

So far, we’ve received over 60 followers since starting this experiment, so we plan to continue with this strategy. 

Next steps 

We’re going to continue with these experiments for the rest of the summer. For Instagram, Raposa hopes to reach 4,000 before the end of August. For LinkedIn, it would be great to get to 200 followers by that same time. 

Since part of this is turning followers into subscribers, we’re hoping that the announcement of our new civic health guide in early August will encourage followers to subscribe. 

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Cite this article

Voris, Makayla (2025, Aug. 5). Experimenting with content strategies on Instagram, LinkedIn. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/experimenting-with-content-strategies-on-instagram-linkedin/