TIME’s Instagram feed in Q2 2025 captured a world in motion from courtroom rulings to heat domes, moon phases, and Met Gala red carpets. A breakdown of their 338 posts from April to June reveals how the publisher used the platform: what topics dominated, how visual formats performed, and which stories cut through.
What TIME Covered Most on Instagram
After categorizing every post by theme, politics and religion led the quarter, followed by a strong dose of pop culture and global conflict. Science, health, and the environment showed up in smaller clusters.
Here’s how the themes broke down:
Political and religious content performed best when it connected to a larger moment. A post about Pope Francis’s death topped 147,000 interactions, while carousels on U.S. Supreme Court decisions and European elections also performed well.
Cultural stories ran a broad array of topics, from Met Gala fashion breakdowns, book roundups, TV reviews, and stage profiles. They were often pushed forward by vivid portrait photography. A carousel on actor Audra McDonald’s record Tony nominations earned 14,000+ interactions.
Conflict coverage appeared mostly in Reels and carousels tied to specific flashpoints. One of the quarter’s top posts showed Greta Thunberg being detained in Gaza, as part of a humanitarian protest against Israeli military policy..
Climate and science content also captured some attention, mostly with novelties. A Reel showing lab scientists working to revive the extinct “Dire Wolf” became the most-engaged post of the quarter (228,000 interactions). Extreme heat explainers and carbon-footprint data stories also popped up sporadically.
Instagram Formatting
TIME used both photos and Reels for its Instagram content in Q2, with photos the more heavily used of the two.
Carousels did much of the heavy lifting. They were used for news explainers, story timelines, quotes, and visual context. These posts consistently earned mid-range engagement, especially when tied to events with legal, religious, or historical weight.
Reels were rarer but sharper. When TIME used video, it was often to show something unique or new: protests, lab work, battlefield footage. Reels had a higher ceiling for engagement, with the top two posts both being Reels.
What Worked
TIME showed that you could have a successful quarter on Instagram without posting ten times a day.
The strongest posts relied heavily on visuals from a scientist reviving an ancient species, a Greta Thunberg being removed from a ship by armed officers, the death of the Pope.
These are all stories that have the potential to reach a broad audience and are mostly general interest, but it’s the context given around strong visuals that allows them to be successful on a platform like Instagram.
For more on where publishers have seen success in Q2, head over to our report.
