This thesis focuses on how news media can use Instagram effectively as a publishing and marketing platform. The research focuses on Yle's regional newsrooms, which all have Instagram accounts, but whose publishing and content still vary a lot. The research work has been done in the best way for it to be used to guide these regional newsrooms towards better planned Instagram production.

The study consists of surveys created for Yle's online producers and followers of Instagram accounts. Information has also been obtained by interviewing Yle Helsinki's social media editor and Yle southwestern Finland's manager responsible for the social media editor experiment that has begun in Turku. Statistics from Instagram accounts have been retrieved from the analytics services Falcon and CrowdTangle.

In this study, it was found that content production for Yle's regional newsrooms on Instagram still differs from what followers would like to see in this app, or which posts are most popular there. Also, a significant note is that publishing on Instagram varies in regional newsrooms because there are no common guidelines for publishing or employees focused on Instagram.

In this thesis, I tell about Instagram's possibilities and proven means, and suggest how Yle's regional newsrooms could serve followers there better. The key suggestion is to consider Instagram as an important channel rather than looking at it as a way to get visitors to move to Yle’s other platforms from there. This would support Yle's goal of appearing on all channels used by Finns. It would be especially important to share reliable information for young people through Instagram, which they actively use as one of their main news sources.

The results of this study also recommend concentrating more resources on Instagram, so that content production can be done more actively and professionally. This would contribute to making the goals set for the platform more realistic to achieve.