Leveraging Other People’s Content on Instagram

Leveraging Other People’s Content on Instagram

When building an effective social media presence for your company, understanding what makes social media work is important. Social media is based on several factors including presence, connections, communication, and content.

Presence: Each social network allows you to create a profile which becomes your presence on that particular platform.

Connections: You can "friend" or follow other accounts leading to connections.

Communication: You can communicate publicly to a group or wider audience or privately to one or a few.

Content: Then you can "consume" content - reading, listening, watching - and produce and publish content to be consumed by others.

As you grow your audience and use your social media presence to increase brand awareness and strengthen relationships with customers and prospects, one of the main ways you attract attention and elicit engagement is by posting content to your accounts. If you’re not in the business of producing content, this can be a daunting task. When trying to keep up with content production for a highly visual social network like Instagram, this task can even be more challenging.

There are a number of ways you can leverage other people’s content on Instagram in addition to posting your own content. Whose content should you use? Some sources of quality content on Instagram could be:

1. News agencies or other media outlets that post content that could be of interest to your followers.
2. Organizations with causes and content that might resonate with your followers.
3. "Influencers" or high-profile individuals or entities with an active following.
4. Experts in their field with content relevant to the messages you’d like to share.
5. Content creators who post aesthetically pleasing visuals such as inspirational graphics or other well-produced content.

Most people would like others to share their content as long as there is proper credit given or, preferably, links back to their Instagram accounts. Some accounts may block this kind of sharing. Taking screenshots of someone else’s content and then sharing it on your own account would not be acceptable and would be considered a copyright violation.

Here are a few ways to leverage other people’s content on Instagram - and variations of some of these methods could also work on other social networks.

Share a post to your Stories. Most posts on Instagram can be shared to Stories although some accounts may block this. When you share someone else’s post to your Stories, the Instagram handle of the content’s creator appears along with a link to their account. Keep in mind you will be driving traffic to their account so make sure their Instagram feed is on brand for you and not controversial or offensive.

Remix content from another post. In Instagram’s Reels feature, you can add your own content to someone else’s video. Using the Remix with this Reel option, you can record your own video that will be "stitched" to the original video allowing you to elaborate on their message or comment on it. Doing this creates a new Reel on your account and notifies the original content producer. The remix feature can be turned on or off through your account settings so not every post on Instagram can be remixed.

Add audio to your Reels. Similar to remixing, you can take audio from other people’s Reels unless they block the feature from their posts. If you see a Reel using music you like or with some dialogue you’d like to reuse, you can click to see the audio track listing and also see what other accounts have used the audio. Many musical artists add their original music to Reels where they encourage Instagram users to reuse it to help gain an audience. For a potential boost of visibility, look for trending audio to use on your videos.

Participate in a Collaboration post. If someone else invites you to collaborate on a post, this is another way to get content from someone else on your Instagram feed. You can also invite others to collaborate on a post (in the same place where you tag people in the post) and your content will be shared on their feed. This is a way to share exposure to audiences as well as content. Be selective when collaborating with other accounts on Instagram and any other social network. Partners, vendors, and customers could be appropriate collaborators.

As you can see, Instagram has several built-in features to encourage leveraging other people’s content and many people want you to reshare their content appropriately. When in doubt, send a direct message or message the content creator through their website to ask permission. Keep in mind that other people may be sharing your content, too. Pay attention to your notifications to keep track of when that happens.