Submitted by SocialChain

Broadening the Readership of The Times and Sunday Times

Influencer Marketing

SocialChain worked with six female UK creators across Instagram and TikTok to broaden readership of The Times and Sunday Times, reporting 1.2m views.

34.9kengagement
1,481link clicks
1.2mviews

Case in 60 seconds

The Times and Sunday Times needed to broaden readership by shifting perceptions and building trust in their journalism, so the task ran through credibility and relevance rather than through reach or frequency alone.

The campaign appears to turn on the reading that trust in journalism transfers through people an audience already follows, because a creator describing what the title adds to daily life carries relevance in a way a publisher's own claim about quality cannot.

Position The Times and Sunday Times as reading that informs smarter, healthier and more curious lifestyles, so the title is shown through what it adds to a reader's day rather than through its institutional standing.

SocialChain collaborated with six female UK creators spanning nano, micro, mid-tier and macro tiers across diverse verticals, who produced stills, videos and stories on Instagram and TikTok to drive engagement and traffic to the website.

SocialChain reports 1.2m views, 34.9k engagement and 1,481 link clicks for the work, which the agency frames as genuine engagement and quality traffic to The Times and Sunday Times website.

Strategy Breakdown

The primary strategy-learning section — interpretation, not a press-release summary.

Trust in journalism is the thing the brief set out to build, which means the campaign was competing with a general scepticism the page does not describe in detail, so the work had to be carried by people an audience already believed.
News brands are widely known and narrowly used, so the difficulty was not awareness of The Times and Sunday Times but a perception of the title as distant from everyday life, which the brief names as the thing to shift.
The title is positioned as an input to smarter, healthier and more curious lifestyles, which casts the publisher as something a reader uses rather than an institution a reader respects from a distance.
Based on the available evidence, the campaign treats subscription as the end of a chain that starts with a creator's recommendation and passes through a link click, which is why the reported results carry a click figure alongside views and engagement.

Creative & Execution System

Assets & channels

  • Instagram
  • TikTok
  • stills
  • stories
  • videos

Partners

  • SocialChain (lead_agency)

Creator role

  • six female UK Creators, a mix of nano, micro, mid-tier and macro across diverse verticals

Results & Evidence

MetricValueResult type
engagement34.9k engagementengagements
link clicks1,481 link clickstraffic
views1.2m viewsvideo_views

Why SocialChain's strategy worked

  1. 1

    Casting across nano, micro, mid-tier and macro tiers at once spreads a publisher brief over both reach and closeness, which suits a trust objective because the smaller accounts carry credibility while the larger ones supply the volume the awareness half of the brief needs.

  2. 2

    Selecting creators from diverse verticals rather than from news or current affairs lets a title demonstrate relevance inside subjects an audience already follows, which is the mechanism by which a perception shift reaches people who do not consider themselves news readers.

  3. 3

    Running stills, videos and stories together gives a subscription brief both a browsing surface and a swipe-through surface, and the reported link clicks suggest the stories format was doing the work the reach formats cannot.

Related Case studies