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.
Summarize Long-Form Content in Instagram Carousels
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.
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.
Resize YouTube Videos for Reels
While Reels isn’t as new by any stretch of the imagination, 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.
It’s simple and straightforward to trim and resize a video to make it Reel-friendly, especially with tools like templates for editing software or tools dedicated to social videos. You can even use your YouTube video description as the Reels caption and upload it from your computer.
Create Video Teasers & Clips
In addition to posting entire YouTube or longer-form videos on Reels, 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 a series of posts that each focus on one specific talking point from your larger video.
Many people find it counter-intuitive that you can reuse content for your Instagram posts, but why work harder when you can work smarter? If you need help with your own Instagram marketing, you can always reach out to us for a free consultation.