You have a ton of gorgeous photos that you've taken for your Instagram, but why? Just to post them once and then let them get buried in your feed? I am going to show you the five places that I reuse all of my Instagram photos to help market my pins and sell more of them!
I recently posted a video all about my photo setup and how I take photos for Instagram using just my phones. You can check that out. And I also have a video all about Instagram tips for pin makers. So you can check that out too.
And I have a webinar that is an in depth look like step-by-step of ways that you can increase your following on Instagram. So check that out as well. I’m super into Instagram, can you tell? Haha!
You have all this gorgeous content, why not use it and make it work for you? So these are all the places that I reuse my photos to make the most of my time and content!
Instagram Stories
The first place and the first logical place to reuse your photos is in Instagram Stories. I've mentioned this before, every time you post a photo on your feed, use that paper airplane and shoot it over to your stories.
You get bonus points if you hide your post behind a gif as a teaser to make people click through to see it. If you add some kind of call to action in that Stories description, asking them a question that you want them to answer on your feed post that can help drive traffic and engagement. This is the perfect place to share your feed post, because people who see your stories are the most engaged of your audience.
You can also use photos in your stories as template background behind text. For example, if you're doing a Q/A or if you just want to make an announcement, you can give that Story a little more umph by using a photo of your products.
Your Shop
I think you should also reuse your Instagram content in your online shop.
So you've taken all of these photos, you probably have multiple photos of the same pin and you can reuse that in your shop as supplemental images on your listings. I challenge you to go through your shop and see if you have any listings that need more photos.
Customers love seeing your products in context. I used to work for a startup as head of the photo team and we did a lot of testing around what product imagery people responded to. The images showing products in use by a person, or in an appropriate environment always outperformed images on a white background. So if you have a photo of your pin in context being worn, shown on a surface, or in action, those are always going to convert better than just a plain photo on white.
If your shop if has the ability to have cover images or feature images or collection images, that's a good place to reuse Instagram photos as well. I use Shopify right now and I have the ability to create collections and then assign a photo to represent those collections.
All right, so the third place that you can reuse your Instagram images is Pinterest. I mentioned that in a marketing video recently that I like to use Pinterest and it’s a great way to reuse your content from Instagram. So if you have photos that are vertically aligned (I think it's good to take up more space on both Pinterest and Instagram), you can pop them over on to Pinterest. Check out the video above to see a tutorial on how to do that.
The fourth place to reuse your Instagram photos and content is in emails. You know I love emails, I talk about it in my marketing video, which I've already linked. But emails are super important. Make your list already and you can use your photos as hero images. You can put them in your content, you can even show your top three posts from the week or the month as another piece of content for your email list. So there are lots of different ways you can reuse your photos in your emails.
Another fun thing you can do, I just thought of in your emails is you can also set them as a link. So if someone happens to click an image you can shoot them right over to the listing for the pins that you have in the photo.
The last place that you should reuse your Instagram photos as Instagram?!
I have been posting super regularly on Instagram for years, so I have a huge of backlog of photos for Instagram and at lot of them are pins from my permanent collection, so I've got tons of content.
Why not reuse it? Especially if the photo is like a year or more old. You have so many more followers than you did when you first posted that photo and they’ve never seen it. And you can't even guarantee that some of the followers that you did have, saw that photo anyway, so you might as well re-share it.
I mean I wouldn't do it super recently. Like don't do duplicate photos a few weeks or even like a couple of months apart because that might be noticeable. But if you have older photos you might as well. I've reused some from my Halloween collection this year that I did for last year. And especially if it's a photo that you know performs well, there is no harm in using it again, just don't go nuts and like have the same photo over and over again. I formally give you permission to reuse your Instagram photos on Instagram!
Those were the five places I think you should reuse your Instagram content and photos. If you want to grow your Instagram following, you should check out my webinar, five ways to grow your following fast and that talks all about how to take photos, how to find your people, how to sell more pins. I go super in depth into everything in that. So definitely check that out.