For a long time, Instagram stumped marketers for companies that didn’t have a brand that easily translated into visual imagery.
If you didn’t have a physical product or appealing aesthetics, it was easy to feel like the platform wasn’t one your brand needed to worry about. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore Instagram in your social media strategy.
Luckily, it’s also becoming increasingly easy to create content for the platform, even if your brand isn’t one you’d suspect to thrive on such a visual app.
Because it’s no longer just a platform for pictures, it’s increasingly where people go for almost everything, even news.
Between the latest features added to the platform and the user trends they’ve enabled, it’s never been easier to come up with an Instagram marketing strategy for a “non-visual” brand.
This is especially the case when you’re already creating content for other channels since some of the most popular and engaging trends right now are perfect for repurposing content.
Let’s look at how.
1. Summarize Long-Form Content in Instagram Carousels
Let’s talk about Instagram carousels first.
After all, that’s where they fall on the chart of Instagram’s most engaging post types.
Carousels are a perfect way to share longer-form written content you’ve created for other platforms, like blog posts, podcast show notes, ebooks, and emails.
How you would want to go about this depends on whether you’re creating native-only content, or trying to also drive people to the original content.
If you’re creating a native-only carousel for Instagram, you can summarize each section of the longer form content in 1-2 slides each, and use the caption to introduce it all and get people hooked enough to swipe through.
Then, on the last side, use a CTA to drive engagement like comments, shares, and saves.
If you’re creating a teaser for the original piece of content, you could pull some of the most interesting quotes or nuggets of information for people to swipe through.
Then, you can use a CTA on the last slide to drive people to visit the full content.
2. Curate a Series of Posts Into an Instagram Guide
Another way to take advantage of longer-form written content is by curating Instagram Guides.
Originally created as a way to share reliable public health info around COVID-19, the feature is quietly being rolled out to all users.
I’ve always been a fan of repurposing blog posts into a series of Instagram captions, but there was no way to link them together as a series, other than simply saying so in the captions. This changes with Instagram Guides.
Guides let you collect your past posts into a scrollable sequence to share on its own. They have shareable URLs, can be shared to stories and the feed, and live in a dedicated tab on user profiles.
So now when you break down each blog post section into its own Instagram caption, you can use this feature to roll them back up again. This lets users easily get the whole story or piece of content without leaving the platform.
3. Resize YouTube Videos for IGTV
While IGTV isn’t as new of a trend as information carousels and guides, I’ve still noticed a lot of brands hesitant to jump into it, even when they’re creating video content on other platforms like their website, Facebook, or YouTube.
To continue to do that in 2021 is to ignore a pretty quick win.
It’s simple and straightforward to trim and resize a video to make it IGTV-friendly, especially with tools like templates for editing software or tools dedicated to social videos, like Kapwing. You can even use your YouTube video description as the IGTV caption and upload it from your computer.
Once you work it into your larger system, it takes little extra time.
In addition Instagram’s algorithm loves surfacing IGTV videos, and the users on the other end of that algorithm are hungry for video content.
It’s a win for all sides.
4. Screenshot Your Best Tweets
Next up, don’t forget to screenshot your best tweets.
And if you’re not on Twitter yet, consider tweeting your best quotes.
There are even design templates that let you create quote graphics that look like tweets, without having to send an actual tweet.
Choose whichever option feels simplest for you.
For reasons I still don’t really understand, quotes shared as screenshots of tweets tend to perform better on Instagram than sharing the same quote in a different image style.
(It even led to a great joke from Twitter’s own Instagram.)
If you’re creating written content for Twitter, that makes repurposing for Instagram content incredibly easy.
Some people (myself included) like to “fancy them up” with an on-brand background photo or image, but that’s not even necessary.
All you need to do is screenshot.
5. Create Video Teasers & Clips
In addition to posting entire YouTube or longer-form videos on IGTV, you can also use the same tools and workflow to create shorter clips that promote the full piece.
This allows you to get multiple Instagram posts from one YouTube video.
Like breaking up text posts into a series of Instagram posts, this allows you to create series of posts that each focus on one specific talking point from your larger video.
6. Create Story Highlights of Your Best Instagram Content
My final Instagram repurposing tip gets a little meta.
In addition to sharing content from other platforms to your Instagram feed, make sure you also share everything from your Instagram feed to your Instagram Stories.
It’s suspected that many users spend more time tapping through stories than scrolling the feed, so this helps them see your feed content.
What’s more, once you share something to your stories, you can save it in a Story Highlight so that it lives at the top of your profile as evergreen content.
This is a great idea for any foundational content or series, along with curating your Instagram content into different categories for users to browse.
Make Instagram Easy
Beautiful and aspirational images – what once made Instagram marketing out of reach for so many of us – are becoming a less important part of the platform, making more room for useful multimedia and interesting information.
You’re already putting so much effort into creating just that for other platforms and websites.
So why not share them where your customers are spending more and more time?
It just makes sense to make repurposing for Instagram a priority.
More Resources:
- 9 Expert Tips to Earn Traffic from Instagram
- 30 Instagram Facts You Need to Know
- How to Dominate Social Media Marketing: A Complete Strategy Guide
Image Credits
All screenshots taken by author, December 2020
