How to Repurpose a Blog Post for Instagram

Instagram is a great platform for sharing photos and videos with your followers. However, to increase your content marketing effectiveness, it’s important to provide value to them in such a way that they become new customers.

Does this mean you have to spend even more hours creating new content for IG?

What if I told you that you can take your value packed blog post and turn it into multiple pieces of content for Instagram?

In this post you’ll learn how to choose the right blog post and the different ways you can repurpose it for Instagram content.

Let’s get started.

How to Choose the Blog Post to Repurpose for Instagram

The Tone

There are a few things to keep in mind when you are choosing the blog post to repurpose for Instagram. Instagram is a visual platform, so think about the tone of your account and what content will fit that tone.

For example, if your account is more lighthearted and humorous, then a blog post about taking photos of your dog for #dogdaytoday might be a good choice. Compare this to a blog post about how to teach your dog not to be reactive.

Conversely, if your account is more serious or informational, then the blog post about reactive dogs would be more appropriate. You want to match the tone of your Instagram feed to the blog post you choose to repurpose.

The Audience

Take into account the audience that will be following you on Instagram. Are they following you because you share amazing recipes for beginners or the advanced skills needed for an amazing Baked Alaska? Some posts are better suited for an avid food lover following your account, while other posts may be better suited for someone who is less familiar with cooking or baking, but wants to learn.

What Type Of Posts Do Well on Instagram

If you look at your Instagram insights (statistics) are there posts that do better than others? Let’s say your tutorials posts do really well, do you have any blog posts that are written as a tutorial? if so, these would be a good fit for repurposing to your Instagram feed.

The other thing to keep in mind is the posts that do well on your Instagram account, are they reels, single image posts, carousels or stories? At the time of writing, Instagram is favouring reels, so do you have a blog post that you can condense down into a reel? (more about this coming up)

If you have a step by step blog post, Instagram Carousels are fantastic because you can show off multiple images and videos in slides and let the viewer swipe though your “mini presentation”.

Stories let you tell a longer, more complex story with multiple images and videos, but note that they have a lifespan of 24 hours.

How to Choose the Specific Blog Post Content to Repurpose for Instagram

At this point, you may have a few blog posts in mind that you want to repurpose. Let’s narrow this down. If you have a 2,000 word blog post, can you condense the content to:

• a 30 second reel with a caption
• 10 slide carousel with a caption
• a single image post with a caption
• 3 slide story

Most likely the answer is “no” and you’d be correct. Look at the blog post and break up the content. If you have a blog post with 10 sections (your outline), can you repurpose a section into Instagram content? If not, break it down even more.

The goal is to create valuable content, but not at the expense of keeping it short. It’s best to select specific content and work with that.

Example: take a look at the blog post you’re reading right now. There is no way I would even consider creating an reel or carousel based on this entire blog post. For the section “How to Choose the Blog Post to Repurpose for Instagram” I would take the sub-section: “The Tone” and create a reel, carousel or even a single image post using this content.

You may ask “but Gisèle, what if they want more info?”… and that’s where you can put a link to your full blog post in your caption or if you have a mini landing page in your “link in bio”, you can put your blog post there. See the example below:

Decide on the Instagram Format (single, carousel, story or reel)

Now that you have the content chosen for repurposing, which format would be more suitable? For myself, I would suggest Reels as the first choice, then a carousel, story and single image post.

If the content you’ve selected is a personal opinion on a topic, a reel, story or single image post would work.

If the content is a step by step on preparing pesto in 5 minutes, a reel, carousel and story would be good and even a single image post would work if the image is a scroll-stopping photograph.

Don’t be afraid to experiment. You can do a reel, carousel or single image post AND also do an Instagram story as these appear in different areas in your account.

Create the Content for the Format Chosen

Reels

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert here , but I will give you a few tips that I found helpful when creating my own reels.

• Use your subject or message as the basis for your reel. You don’t need to include every detail, just touch on the main points that are important to you and your audience.
• Keep it simple. Don’t add too many clips or visuals that are unrelated to your message or theme.
• Make sure the sound is appropriate, too — if you’re talking, you don’t want viewers to have to strain to hear what’s being said!
• If you’re using trending audio, make sure it’s appropriate for the theme of your reel. No point in using music that’s heavy metal if your reel is about relaxing to relieve stress.
• Include a call to action at the end of your reel. Tell people what you want them to do (comment, like, save, share)
• Reels can be as long as 60 seconds, but without compromising quality, keep your reels as short as possible so people watch the entire thing.

Example:

I’m going to use this section you’re currently reading (reels) as an example. If reels are capped at 60 seconds, would this content be best served in a reel? If I was doing a talking head video (where I’m talking on camera), I might be able to get it done in 60 seconds, but that’s pushing it. So what could I do instead? Create a reel for each bullet point, expanding on the content a bit and keep each reel at 10–15 seconds.

Carousels

This format is great for showing off a variety of different images and videos together, as well as letting viewers swipe left or right to see more content.

Carousels can have a maximum of 10 slides with images or video and text. Keep it simple. If you were going to create a 10 slide carousel, here is how you can visualize it keeping in mind that the reader should want to swipe to read the next slide.

• Slide 1: your cover image and title (attention grabbing hook)
• Slide 2: the introduction (creates interest which the reader wants to swipe to keep reading)
• Slides 3–8: your tutorial or process (the steps to complete something, or the steps to the transformation or how to do x)
• Slide 9 — Summary or Recap (summarize what they just learned)
• Slide 10 — Your call to action (follow, save, share, like, comment)

Images, Sizes and Hashtags

• Choose images or 60 second video clips that represents the main point of your post — for example, if you’re writing about travel, feature photos of beautiful places you’ve visited.
• Make sure all the images and videos in the carousel are related to one another — they shouldn’t be randomly scattered throughout the post like they would be on a traditional blog post page layout, but rather grouped together beneath a common headline or banner graphic instead (again, this helps with visual cohesion).
• Carousel size can be 1080×1080 or 1080×1350
• Use hashtags in your captions, so Instagram knows how to categorize your content.

Sidenote: Can I be honest? I absolutely love Instagram carousels and I can see this entire blog post working for multiple carousels.

Single Image Posts

This is the easiest to create, a 1080×1080 image, a caption and hashtags is all you need. Keep in mind that depending on your audience, some may just click like on a post and not bother reading your caption. I’ve seen a few creators add “read the caption” to the bottom of their photos.

Instagram Stories

Stories would be a great way to share the content you just created and add some more insights. IG stories allows links, so include a link to your blog post.

I like to use stories for “in the moment” topics, so even if you record a 15 second chat about something of importance in your post, it will draw attention to it.

Research Hashtags

If you’re on Instagram, you know the importance of hashtags. There is no magic formula and I use tools like Flick and Hashtag Manager to research hashtags. Many social media tools include these types of features as well.

Write the Caption

The jury is out on how long a caption should be. I believe it depends on your audience and the content.

• Some say with reels, the caption should be short (personally, I find captions on reels hard to read because IG has the captions appearing without a background, so your video is the background.
• Carousels may not need an in-depth caption because the details are in the carousel itself.
• Single image posts need a caption to explain the context of the image.

I say experiment with different lengths based on your audience. If your audience are busy solopreneurs, they may not have time to read a 2,200 character caption. But if your audience are new to baking desserts, they may appreciate the full recipe in your caption.

Schedule or Post in Real Time

Depending on the tools you use for scheduling, such as Plann, Later, Planoly, Content Studio, Promo Republic or Creator Studio etc., at the time of writing, all content types except reels can be scheduled.

Conclusion

Repurposing your blog posts for Instagram is a great way to get more followers and engagement on your photos, reels, stories and carousels. I hope this guide has helped you and tag me (@itsjustg) in your next post so I can support you.