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15 Best Instagram Post Ideas to Create Fresh Content
Instagram has transformed how enterprises use the internet. Led by images and videos, it is one of the most popular social media networks globally. Not surprisingly, businesses are leveraging the platform to connect with existing customers and penetrate new markets. But there's a catch.
Companies that focus on Instagram marketing purposes constantly require new Instagram post ideas to publish engaging and dynamic content every so often. They need more creative concepts or themes. So how can they meet this requirement? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to be exploring in today’s article with the 15 best Instagram post ideas for you to give a whirl and effective brainstorming practices.
Let’s jump right in.
Instagram post ideas for 2024
Let's start now with the best Instagram post ideas for you to draw inspiration from.
1. Behind-the-scenes sneak peeks
Share a glimpse of your creative process. Give your followers an exclusive look at what goes on behind closed doors. One major trend on Instagram right now is #GRWM or get ready with me.
These reels showcase what influencers do to achieve those flawless looks. They keep audiences entertained with their make-up routines while giving pep talks on top-of-mind topics. Mesmerizing and offering great engagement, is a great way to subtly promote your brands and products, especially if you’re in the cosmetics industry.
2. Fun polls and quizzes
Pose interactive questions or organize quizzes to raise brand awareness and engagement, and gather valuable insights from your audience.
This post highlights how a simple quiz-like scenario on the English language has gathered more than 21k likes and hundreds of comments. If you plan to launch a new product or tweak an existing one, try engaging your target customers with quizzes and polls.
Related Read: How to plan the perfect product launch on social media
3. Product demos or tutorials
Hop onto this trend and demonstrate how to use your products or services. A make-up or hairstyle tutorial, an electronic gadget tutorial, or simply a tutorial on folding clothes can garner a lot of attention.
This video post showcases how a braid can be made in just three easy steps. And here’s another snippet showing an easy and interesting way to fold clothes.
Source
By providing interesting demos or tutorials, you won’t only be highlighting your product or industry knowledge, but you’ll also be getting a great opportunity to showcase your products and services.
4. Product reviews or testimonials
Testimonials and reviews from satisfied customers can build credibility and trust in the audience that you’re targeting. A positive review from satisfied customers can boost confidence in your brand and encourage others to try your products. Such testimonials and endorsements make the decision-making process easier for your potential customers. Once they have social proof, your brand automatically gets a credibility boost and earns the trust of your audience.
To feature the testimonials and feedback from your customers effectively:
- Get your customers' feedback regularly through social media listings, review requests, and surveys.
- Publish these reviews on your marketing materials, social media accounts, and website.
- Use videos or photos of your customers (with their permission), along with their testimonials, to validate their authenticity.
- Remember to reply to the testimonials or reviews. It shows that you appreciate and value your customers, resulting in positive relationships.
Recommended Read: How to respond to customers on social media
5. Q&A or ask-me-anything (AMA) sessions
Hosting Q&A or ask-me-anything (AMA) sessions is an engaging, interactive, and real-time way to connect with your audience directly on social media. These sessions allow you to address their queries, provide valuable insights, and foster a sense of community and trust.
This Ukrainian-born influencer sold her home and decided to travel in an RV with her family. Such content is invaluable for those interested in a similar, adventurous lifestyle and who are curious about transitioning from a stationary home to a mobile one.
💡 Pro Tip: Inform your audience in advance about your program and ask them to submit their questions before the session begins. You can review these questions and organize them into themes and categories. Once the session begins, you should be ready with your responses. Join prepared and stay transparent if you have to answer spontaneous questions during live Q&As or AMAs.
6. Before-and-after images
Share before-and-after photos to showcase the tangible benefits of using your solutions and share updates on your offerings. Visual evidence can be highly persuasive and compelling for skincare routines, website redesign, digital transformation, weight loss, or home renovation projects. Check out the Instagram post below for fresh ideas:
Adding context to photos by attaching a compelling narrative is more than just explaining the story behind the transformation; it's about immersing the audience in the journey captured in your images.
💡 Pro Tip: Avoid adding overly edited photos that may mislead your audience. As per reports, 81% of consumers need to trust a brand before purchasing from it. So, ensure that you only post genuine pictures showing the results achieved by real clients. Transparency is key to winning the trust of your audience.
7. Brand collaborations
Plan a strategic partnership with other brands to expand your reach and target each other's audiences. Choose a brand whose identity and values resonate with your content, audience demographics, and business objectives. Collaborate with partners who complement your products and have the same target audience. For instance, a mobile banking app could partner with a budgeting tool. It could allow users to track expenses and set savings goals directly within the banking app.
Beyond collaboration, try building solid relationships with your partners. Show support by appreciating their work and looking for opportunities to work together. Prioritize delivering value to your audience rather than focusing solely on promoting your offerings.
Get Started: How to kickstart your social media collaboration
8. Giveaways and rewards
Giveaways and rewards linked to social media contests are among the most effective and popular ways to attract new followers and engage with your audience. Offer a prize that appeals to your audience to incentivize participation. It could be a service, a product, or a gift card.
Decide how you want the participants to enter your giveaway contests. Brands commonly ask the audience to tag their friends in the comments, follow their Instagram account, like the giveaway post, or repost the giveaway alert.
Promote your giveaway with attractive visuals. Be very transparent in communicating the selection criteria for a winner, the entry submission deadline, and other giveaway requirements.
Related Read: Social Media Engagement: What You Need to Know!
9. Meme-marketing
When it comes to Instagram post ideas, memes are ruling the roost. Why? They can go viral and boost organic growth.
Users tend to engage more with funny memes by commenting or sharing them with others. This increases the visibility and reach of your posts as more people discover and relate to your content.
Relatable and humorous memes can go viral quickly. Also, analyze the memes that resonate with your audience to make a deeper impact.
💡 Pro Tip: Create memes about current events, popular culture or shared experiences. Keep an eye on emerging meme formats or popular templates to capitalize on current trends. Track the performance of your meme marketing campaigns to measure reach, engagement and sentiment. A great way to do this is by using Sprinklr’s social media analytics and reporting tool, which brings you actionable insights on campaign performance, customer sentiment, emerging trends and more.
10. Myth-busting
There is a lot of information on the internet and not all of it is true. As a domain specialist and business stakeholder, you know the myths surrounding your industry.
Bust them.
One at a time.
In this post, the speaker dismantles myths surrounding the application of retinoids.
You, too, can choose a topic that garners your audience's interest and bust your industry myths in an informative and engaging way. This lets you connect with your audience and debunk falsehoods and misconceptions within your niche.
💡 Pro Tip: Figuring out what your audience’s preferences can be quite challenging, especially when there are some many people who you need to cater too. But there’s an easy fix to this in Sprinklr’s Audience Insights tool which helps you identify critical demographic and behavioral insights in 30+ areas of interest, including products, media, sports and more. It also lets you create custom audience segments based on engagement metrics (likes, shares, follower counts, etc.) and audience profiles.
11. Influencer endorsements
A solid influencer marketing strategy introduces your brand to new audiences and reinforces the credibility of your products and services. Align your brand with established influencers to create a positive perception and impact your audience.
Here's an influencer promoting Indian cuisine at an eatery in the US. She showcases the type of food offered at the restaurant she's visiting. This is beneficial for both the brand and her followers — a win-win scenario for everyone.
💡 Pro Tip: Use Sprinklr's Influencer Marketing Platform to partner with the best influencers and track their performance as well. Not only does it help you find the ideal influencers for your brand’s marketing efforts, but it also helps you manage influencer campaigns and data across 30+ digital and social channels from a single, unified dashboard.
12. User-generated content
Looking for organic growth on Instagram? Focus on community building by making the most of user-generated content (UGC) content marketing.
You can do this by acknowledging and celebrating your audience's content. Share it socially. Tag their content with mentions on your page. What you will get in return is priceless: loyal brand advocates. This can drive organic growth and inculcate a sense of belonging in your followers.
💡 Pro Tip: Identify the best time to post this social media content to optimize engagement and maximize its impact. You don't want to publish your posts in the middle of the night as it won’t give you the desired results.
If you aren’t sure about when’s the right time to post on Instagram, you can use Sprinklr’s social media planning tool to:
- Schedule and publish content across 10+ social channels (Instagram included) from a single dashboard
- Auto-schedule your posts and publish them at AI-recommended times for better engagement and viewership
- Set up multilevel publishing approval so your content stays brand-compliant always
13. Funny GIFs
GIFs allow you to express your thoughts, ideas, and feelings light-heartedly. These attention-grabbing looping animations can increase the engagement of your posts. Relatable and entertaining GIFs get more comments, likes, and shares, increasing your reach organically.
This funny GIF describes what goes on in an employee's mind when they need to work but don't want to. Relatable scenario? Many of us would love to share it within our circle. Think of something this relatable, link it to your product offering, and boom! Your post goes viral.
For instance, a software company that converts text into digital files could create a GIF showing workers overwhelmed by paperwork and being rescued by a superhero. It could carry a caption like, "Looks like we just 'filed' for a digital upgrade!”
See what it did there? Get innovative. Use puns if they resonate with your target audience.
14. Informative content
Share brain teasers or informative content with your audience. You could post fun facts about the human body, our planet, or your domain’s technology, adding value and generating interest in your audience. But before sharing information, make sure you fact-check.
This post outlines the steps to take if a bird crashes into your window. The infographic detailing what to do and who to contact has garnered over 10,000 likes and numerous comments. Consider using the same format to highlight the benefits of your products and solutions.
Check out this infographic: How to Reach Your Target Audience on Social Media
15. #ThrowbackThursdays
Leverage #TBT (Throwback Thursday) and other trending hashtags to showcase your products or brand memories. They can establish a connection with your audience by highlighting milestones, achievements, or memorable events in your company's history. Use these posts to showcase your brand's evolution.
This lifestyle brand has shared a post on vintage fashion, using the hashtag #ThrowbackThursday. By tapping into nostalgia, you can evoke positive emotions and strengthen relationships with your audience, ultimately enhancing brand loyalty and engagement on Instagram. Find out how to use hashtags like a pro with our dedicated guide.
How to find more Instagram post ideas?
Brainstorming sessions aren’t just team-building exercises; they’re much more as they help generate fresh Instagram post ideas. This is how you should go about them:
1. Encourage employee engagement
Your discussion panel should include team members from all the major departments. Bring diverse perspectives to the table. Team inputs, backed by data on industry trends, competitor analysis, and social media insights, can be very useful in shaping your Instagram post ideas.
Leverage employee advocacy on social media. This also functions as a benchmarking activity, enabling the comparison of your team's social media engagement against that of your competitors.
On this front, you can better inform your discussion by using Sprinklr’s competitive insights and benchmarking tool to:
- Identify and compare your top posts, content themes, channels, and more against competitors
- Benchmark your brand on social media KPIs like engagement, reach, follower count, and more
- Track the social media activity of your competitors across 8 social channels and over 400K social profiles through AI-powered listening
💡 Pro Tip: Encourage team members to share their stories and work experiences on Instagram. Host "Employee Takeover" days where different team members are given control of the company's social media accounts for a day. Create interactive social media challenges that prompt employees to engage with each other and the brand on social media. This will give them a newer outlook, and it’ll help them in coming up with fresh ideas for brainstorming sessions.
2. Evaluate your current state
Examine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) related to your social media presence. Identify interdependencies, the internal factors that can be leveraged, and areas for improvement. Here's a quick guide on social media SWOT analysis.
💡 Pro Tip: Utilize tech tools for real-time insights on the performance of your social media posts for SWOT analysis. Leverage Sprinklr’s social media management solution to know how your organic posts are performing across multiple social channels and to gain real-time findings on post engagement, audience demographics and more. And with Sprinklr AI+, you can make the most of advanced GenAI to instantly brainstorm ideas, generate campaign briefs, create channel-specific posts and more.
3. Use mood boards
The purpose of a mood board is to organize and visualize your creative ideas. Prioritize themes for your Instagram posts and write down related keywords. For instance, if your focus is on interior design, related keywords could include interior design trends, room layout ideas, and color palettes.
4. Play role-storming games
Rolestorming is a brainstorming activity designed to shift your viewpoint. The goal is to imagine yourself in someone else's position. Explore the profiles of thought leaders, competitors, and partners.
- What are their pain points?
- What would they like to see?
- What vocabulary and tone of voice do they use?
Consider their perspectives when brainstorming Instagram post ideas.
5. Leverage mind-mapping techniques
Mind mapping highlights the connections between ideas. Consider this scenario: You are launching a product. Start with the phrase "product launch" during your mind-mapping exercise and branch out with related concepts. This could include target audience demographics, content types (e.g., UGC, GIFs, infographics, and videos), and engagement tactics (e.g., contests and polls).
Dive Deeper: Social Media Brainstorming: How to Unlock Ideation for Brand Growth
Put all Instagram post ideas into action
With a massive pool of over 1 billion monthly users, Instagram can work wonders for your business. And these Instagram post ideas can certainly assist in strategizing your social media marketing approach. But maintaining a social media presence is no simple task.
It involves generating ideas, maintaining a publishing calendar, responding to customers promptly, analyzing metrics, and making real-time strategy adjustments. And that’s where Sprinklr Social can be a comprehensive social toolkit for you.
It provides comprehensive listening capabilities, extensive channel coverage, advanced configurability tailored for enterprise needs, and cutting-edge AI technology. It seamlessly integrates consumer intelligence, marketing, and customer service functionalities into a single platform for streamlined operations. You can effortlessly oversee not just your Instagram posts, but every other social media post across 30+ channels from a unified dashboard.
Keen to explore how this happens?
Frequently Asked Questions
- Create engaging content and write compelling captions.
- Use trending audio clips, hashtags and user-generated content.
- Leverage different formats like photos, videos and carousels that reflect your brand's personality.
Creative content posting is crucial on Instagram because it encourages engagement, promotes the sharing of your content, drives brand awareness and increases your Instagram reach.
Behind-the-scenes seek peeks, influencer posts, UGC posts and funny GIFs are some of the posts that work best on Instagram.
