Sharing trending posts is one of the best ways to grow awareness of your Instagram account and rapidly grow your followers. In this article, we’ll show you what content you should repost, the best place to find it, as well as a step by step guide on how to Instagram repost both images and videos.
What is Instagram reposting?
Reposting (sometimes called ‘regramming’) is where you select a post created by someone else and then share it to your own Instagram account.
There’s lots of benefits of doing this!
- You don’t have to create the content yourself, saving you both time and money
- You can repost trending content from the explore page, generating you a higher Instagram engagement rate
- You can cherry pick content that suits your Instagram account’s theme and grid layout.
For those of you who aren’t aware, there’s no native share button on Instagram. Using the paper aeroplane icon you can share a post to individuals or small groups of followers, however there’s no way to share it to all your followers at once like you can on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
Know the rules
According to Instagram’s terms of service, you’re not technically meant to repost. Despite this, the practice of reposting is very commonplace on Instagram and curating (or ‘sharing’) content plays an important role in an effective social media marketing strategy.
If you’re in an organisation that needs to pay strict attention to compliance, you’ll need to get written permission from the content creator, either in the comments on their post or through Instagram direct message.
For most people though, mentioning the content creator is enough credit. The mention is a clickable link that will grow awareness of the post creator’s account, drive a bunch of profile visits and most likely increase their followers. Happy days!
When you give credit, always include their account name in the first line of the caption, not just a tag on the photo.
Whatever you do, never ever repost content and pretend like it’s yours. This is against copyright law and you could find yourself in a lot of hot water.
Add value with a clear and consistent theme
One of the key strategies we teach here at Social Media College is to have a clear and consistent theme for your account. Think about your Instagram account like buying a magazine. Whether it’s fashion, country living, sports cars or fishing, the content in the magazine always has a clear theme and sticks to it like glue.
For example, a surfing themed account may have pictures of waves, beaches or sunsets, while still remaining within the overall surfing theme.
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It’s also important that your theme adds value to your followers instead of trying to sell your brand or its products. Educate, entertain or inspire your readers! For example, a hairdresser could post photos of their hairdressers cutting hair. Sure, a few people will care, but not many. Instead consider what the target audience values – hair styles. An Insta account centred around hair styles at the salon will grow a much, much bigger follower base.
Instead of using the Feed, the salon can use Stories or Facebook ad retargeting to deliver content that promotes the business.
The best reposts are from the Explore page
Once you have a clearly defined theme for your account, the next step is to find posts to repost. The single best place to find them will be on your Explore page.
Your Explore page is a collection of trending posts from accounts that you don’t yet follow. Everyone’s explore page is different and is based on accounts you already follow and posts that you’ve previously engaged with. So, if you follow a bunch of accounts with a dog theme and like a bunch of dog photos, then your Explore page will be filled with posts of dogs.
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To ensure your Explore page contains trending content that’s similar to your theme, follow a bunch of large, high quality accounts with the same theme. Simple!
How to Instagram repost: A step by step guide
By far and away the best option for reposting is using the Repost for Instagram app. You can find this on Apple’s App Store and Google Play.
The free version will mean that the repost logo will be present when you repost, whereas the paid version will have no logo on your repost. The paid version is only $7 (Android) or $13 (Apple), for lifetime access, so it’s well worth the investment. Best of all, this app can be used to repost both images and videos.
Once you’ve download the app, follow these exact steps:
- Open Instagram
- Find an image or video post you want to repost
- Tap the image or video to see it in full view
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- Tap the ellipses (the three dots in the top right corner)
- Click copy link
- Open the repost app
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Voila, the post you want to repost should have appeared.
Next up:
- Select where you want the repost icon to appear (if you don’t have don’t have the paid version)
- Tap the repost icon, and finally
- Select whether you want to post to your Feed or Stories
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The Instagram app will then open and you should follow the normal prompts to make a Feed or Story post.
Another method you can use is to simply screenshot the image you want to repost. This way is free, but it only works for images and not videos.
Once you’ve taken the screenshot, go into your Instagram app to repost it by following the normal prompts to make a Feed or Story post.
Remember to always give credit to the content creator in the first part of your repost caption!
Have fun reposting!
Congratulations! You now know how to Instagram repost, as well as how to integrate it into your Insta content strategy.
Follow these steps to find great content to repost, increase awareness of your account and explode your follower growth.
So what are you waiting for? Download the repost app and give it a try.
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