Did you know that in July 2018, the number of active users on Instagram reached 1 billion? This social media platform is one of the best options for brands looking to get exposure and engagement. To put this into perspective, it has an even bigger audience than Twitter! Maybe it’s time to use Instagram for your business?
Instagram allows various types of content such as photos, videos, GIFs, and illustrations, meaning that any brand anywhere in the world can showcase its unique voice. To gain and keep followers engaged on Instagram, you need to post your updates constantly. However, it’s not that easy to come up with impressive content ideas or beautiful photos every day or every other day.
Check out Instagram Post editor Canva that has tons of pre-made templates, and animated posts that you can customize as like.
Here, I have put together 25 Instagram post ideas along with examples which you can use if you are caught in a creative block. These ideas can be used for both individual accounts and business accounts to reach a wider audience.
How to Create a Perfect an Instagram Post?
There are 3 ways to make attractive Instagram post:
- Create them from scratch yourself using Canva or Photoshop.
- Hire a professional from Fiverr from $5 to create and edit Instagram Stories for you.
- Purchase a PSD template or find a free option.
1. Style Your Product’s Photos
Instagram is about beautiful and creative visuals, so you need to try harder to take photos of your product to look unique and cool. Sometimes, brands get so busy posting lifestyle content that they forgot to actually include their product.
Learn how to boost your new Instagram post for free.
Morning rituals in Secret Spot cafe in Bali.
Remember, your audience is following you to see why your brand may be different from many others and what makes it stand from the crowd.
Here, Vans is showing that their shoes are great for outside adventures as well as a typical Tuesday
Depending on the amount of content you share, 2-3 photos of your product per week are a must.
2. Lifestyle Photos
Lifestyle photos can help you to showcase how your brand could be used in the real world. To be more specific, instead of sharing photos of your product on the shelf of a store, you can share an image where your product is outside.
Lovehair is a brand of organic cosmetics for hair in beautiful biodegradable bottles
For example, if you are selling hair care products, it would be good to post a picture of your products in a shower or bathroom.
Think about your target audience and about how your ideal client looks like. Now, think of how your product can make their lives better. Think about the problem your product is solving while thinking of the lifestyle they follow and then try to post images that will motivate your potential clients to buy your products.
Gorgeous Shay Mitchell with a beautiful body could motivate to buy nice brand clothes
3. Show Behind the Scenes
People love to sneak peek at how your company works on a daily basis and Instagram is a perfect place for it.
Show your team or other people involved in your business, your office, workspace, product development stages as it will humanize your brand and show your potential customers that there are real people behind the brand.
Umbraco office situation
Photos and videos from behind-the-scenes may include your employees, workplace or office tours, events your brand was involved in, and action shots of team members.
Hootsuite loves owls
Show your followers who you are and what you stand for to let them feel a personal connection.
4. Show Unique Uses of Your Product
You don’t need to use photos of your products taken in a studio and with perfect lighting. Instead, use Instagram to show your followers the unique way to use your product. For example, have you known that you can use Nutella to draw a cute heart on a pancake for Valentine’s day?
Be a little creative and show your users how to implement your product in real-life, unique ways. You can also use customer’s photos to share some cool ideas with your followers.
Here, Forever21 is not trying to sell sneakers but is instead pushing the cuteness of the dog to engage their audience.
5. Show Manufacturing Process
Just like the behind-the-scenes post ideas for Instagram, everybody is curious about where and how your product was/is made.
Cook classic tagliatelle al ragu with PastaGrannies
Let your followers in the origins of their favorite product with pictures taken at different stages of the manufacturing process.
Yes, this girl sells felt balls
6. Tell a Story
You might have an amazing image or video to share, but have you thought about the story you’re going to tell with this content? Sometimes, a boring image turns crazy-interesting with a good story or caption that goes with it.
It’s a great idea to post content on Instagram where the story drives the image from time to time. You just simply need to explain to your audience why this particular image is important and why you decided to share it.
A picture of a ballerina with a dog turns into an interesting story with the text added to the description area. After reading, you look at this image in a different way.
7. Publish User-Generated Content
Without a doubt, user-generated content is one of the most powerful things on the web. User-generated content (UGC) is a piece of content created by a customer, social media follower, fan, or influencer who has used or uses your product or service.
For example, Anthropologie uses UGC because it promotes beautiful content for free and shows happy clients.
More than any other social network, Instagram relies on USC to promote products and services.
Here is a nice lifestyle shot from a happy Productivity Planners customer!
8. Sales Promotion
Instagram is also a suitable place to notify your followers about sales, promotions, and discounts. Just make sure to add an attractive visual to accompany your announcement.
This Starbucks post is a fantastic example of sales promotion
9. Motivational Images
Show your followers that you use and love the products (or services) you create.
Mimi Ikonn, the founder of LuxyHair and LoveHair, posted this photo on her account. She is wearing hair extensions on the image
10. Ask a Question
Asking a question on Instagram is one of the best ways to increase the number of comments under the post. This way, Instagram will notice your content is interesting, and you will get a chance to get to the Explore tab where lots of people would see your post.
This is a great chance to show your expertise or get feedback about your product. It could also help you to get to know your followers better and build an active community.
Who’s using the weekend to catch up on blogging?
You can ask anything, for example, what is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your own business? Or what is your favorite book for vacation?
United asked: Which new route in 2019 are you most excited to fly?
11. Quotes and Text-Based Content
You know there are days in our lives when we need some inspiration and motivation to move forward. Offer this motivation to your followers with your Instagram images. Text-based images and quotes are an effective way to engage your viewers quickly.
Here is an Instagram update from Productivity Planner, notebook to increase your productivity.
You can post quotes from successful people in your industry, quotes you like, positive reviews from your clients, information about sales and promotions, recipes, product-related tips, and more.
If you are going to create a nice image with a quote or any other text, consider using one of the beautiful free handwritten fonts from my previous collection.
12. Show Your Office/Workplace
People who follow their favorite brands on Instagram have probably asked themselves, “Hey, what it’s like to work on Etsy?”, for example.
You can provide a glimpse of day-in-the-life at your office. Shoot working area, corporate gym, kitchen, meetings, employees at lunch, or something like that. It gives your fans a quick sneak peek.
Etsy office
13. Ask an Influencer for Takeover
Hiring a favorite Instagrammer to take over your account is an excellent idea if you want to bring some enhance your feed. Influencers within your field can build awareness and make people trust your brand.
Beautifulcuisines published a recipe from panaceas_pantry
If you choose micro-influencers (with about 100-200k followers) you don’t need to pay them for a takeover. Offer to try your product or service for that. Some brands even ask influencers to do Stories a whole day or cook some meal using your recipe. There are a lot of ways to do that.
14. Share Holiday-Themed Photos
On holidays, like Easter, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving you can share a festive photo which includes your product.
You can also give a discount for this holiday season, for example, 14% for Valentine’s Day.
Christmas-themed paper cups in Starbucks
15. Create a Stop-Motion Video
Stop motion video is a new cool thing lately. Instead of documenting the passage of time as it happens, you need to take a series of photos and “stop” between each one to move the objects as you like. You can use an app for this, for example, Stop Motion Studio.
This hilarious video is taken from Nutella Instagram, tap the link to see the video
On stop motion videos it looks like the objects are moving by themselves. The picture is worth thousands of words, so see yourself.
16. Develop Your Style
If you look at Instagram accounts with a massive following, you’ll see that all of them has their personal style. They don’t think only about how to take an individual shot, but how to make the whole Instagram feed look amazing.
You can also develop a personal photo style just like Murad Osmann did. They started a series of photos with a girl holding a man by hand in different travel locations. After that, the whole world began to copy their style. People recognize their pose once they see it.
This is an Instagram feed of @muradosmann. The couple has hundreds of pictures all around the world with their signature pose
17. Drive Traffic to Your Blog or Website
Try to get into the habit of sharing a new photo on Instagram once you publish an original blog post. It will help to build excitement about what is new to come, but also to get traffic to your blog.
Evelina always notifies her followers about new Youtube videos
18. Ask for Feedback
You can use Instagram to get feedback about your products and content you publish. It’s critically important to ask for feedback. You can add relevant hashtags to your posts to attract a specific audience.
A quick tip: add hashtags in the first comment right after the post, so your description does not look too cluttered.
19. Share Your Archive Photo
There is no need to publish only fresh latest photos on your Instagram. Old photos from your archive can also bring lots of new followers, likes, and traffic to your site, but you need to find a creative way to share this.
Mimi Ikonn with her beautiful daughter, sister, and niece
If it’s a personal account, you can share a photo taken a few years ago and say something motivational about changes in life. If you have a business account, I’m pretty sure the design of your product has changed since then, and you can show your existing followers the old design.
20. Share Your Work in Progress
Work in progress shots are a perfect way to tell your fans a story behind your product. It will help people get to know you better. You can mix work-in-progress shots along with ready pieces so that people can compare. This tip would work amazingly for creatives, for example, artists are designers.
Here is Eddie Lobanovskiy Instagram feed, a designer from Dribbble who does a fantastic typography work
21. Like Time
Like-time is a kind of post when you ask your followers to leave a comment asking for likes. And every commentator should like a few posts of the commentator above.
This way you’ll get a lot of comments under your post which will improve your Instagram rating, and your followers will improve their stats as well. The trick will work only with popular accounts with over 10k followers.
22. SFS Post
SFS is a share for share (or spam for spam) is when you ask your followers to like your last posts in return for liking their posts.
It’s a similar technique to Like time which allows you to increase engagement on your Instagram profile.
23. DIY Ideas
If you know how to create home decor, home-made cosmetics, or clothes, why not to share your ideas with your Instagram followers? This kind of posts gain lots of Saves that is great for your account ranking.
Look at this cute velvet turban headband by @primadethis
24. Hyperlapse Videos
Hyperlapse is a technique which allows you to create motion shots. It is also known as time-lapse videos. You can generate such kind of videos for almost anything which shows progress: nice capture sunset, food recipe, or city traffic.
Beautiful sunset time-lapse video
All equipment you need to have is an iPhone (or DSLR) and a tripod. Hyperlapse video is using a long exposure to create motion blur. You need to try it.
25. Slow Motion
Slow motion is another amazing idea for an Instagram post. It is the opposite thing to time-lapse. This kind of video is super slow, and you can use it to capture awesome things, for instance, make a slow-motion video of a campfire, waterfall, people’s emotions, or anything else. The sky’s the limit.
Here is my slow-motion video we took on Bali with my husband. Check the video in the slideshow:
Over to You
I hope these Instagram post ideas will spark your creativity and give you some inspiration for upcoming weeks.
Let us know which idea you like the most and why. Which types of posts you have already published and what were your results? Also, make sure to follow my personal account on Instagram.
