There’s content on social media that you can’t help but share. It can be funny stories, interesting reels, or celebrity posts. Users sharing your Instagram content is a recipe for growing your following. To do that, you’ll need to come up with shareable content ideas for your Instagram feed.
Specific ideas can vary a lot depending on who makes up your audience. However, there are types of content that tend to get shared a lot like memes, contests, and giveaways. Leveraging these types of content with the right ideas can help you grow your followers and improve your Instagram feed.
In this article, we’ll go over ten shareable content ideas you can use to level up your Instagram feed. Let’s get to it!
What makes content shareable?
If you see a post, a reel, or a story on social media and you think, “I need to send this to some of my friends”, you’ve stumbled on shareable content. Typically, this type of content shares some of the following characteristics:
- It’s highly relatable
- It’s funny
- The content offers value
- There’s an emotional hook
If you open Instagram right now and look at your feed, chances are you’ll stumble on a lot of content that you might want to share with friends. Brands that understand how to leverage these characteristics tend to blow up (at least on social media).
Throughout the rest of this article, we’ll explore multiple shareable content ideas for Instagram feeds and you’ll notice all of them share one or more of these characteristics. If you can manage to come up with an idea that leverages all four, you’ve got content gold on your hands.
Top 9 shareable content ideas for your Instagram feed
For each section, we’ll explore why that type of idea works for Instagram content and how you can use it for your brand or personal account. Plus, we’ll discuss how you can use Spotlight to display all the content you create on your site too.
Let’s start with a classic – memes.
1. Memes
Memes are perhaps the most popular type of content on Instagram. They can come in multiple formats, including images, stories, and reels.
If you can make funny memes, you can pretty much print shares on Instagram:
A smart way to figure out what can work with your audience is to use Spotlight to aggregate content from the meme hashtag on Instagram:
With Spotlight, you can choose to publish those hashtag feeds on your site and keep your audience happy with the memes others make. You can also use these custom feeds as research to come up with fun meme ideas for your brand.
2. Inspirational quotes
People on social media love inspirational quotes and content. Inspirational reels, for example, perform well among millennial demographics and they get a lot of shares:
The key for this type of content is to look for quotes that your audience might like. They can have to do with topics you discuss often, pain points they might share, or just plain cool quotes. Pair them up with decent visuals and the content almost makes itself.
Just as with memes, you can use Spotlight to curate inspirational quotes and content from multiple accounts or hashtags. There are plenty of hashtags that focus solely on collecting this type of content, like #empoweringquotes.
3. Behind-the-scenes shots
In the age of social media, many brands and personalities carefully curate their Instagram feeds to reflect a specific image. While this approach highlights their desired brand identity, it doesn’t always resonate with your audience and could lead to disengagement.
Behind-the-scenes shots, reels, and stories offer a quick way to humanize your brand and offer your audience a glimpse into the realities of the people behind your brand.
Behind-the-scenes shots are incredibly relatable and they can also be easy to produce. You can, for example, use Spotlight to show the Instagram feeds of different members of your team on your site’s About Us page (if they’re comfortable with it!).
4. Polls and questions
Interactive content that invites responses of some kind can get shared a lot. That includes polls, questions, and anything else that engages your audience to respond to you in some way:
One tip to make this kind of content idea more engaging is to outright ask followers to share it. Tell them you want to collect information, get to know them better, or just get funny answers you can repost. It’s a simple call to action and it works.
Instagram Stories are tailor-made for this type of content. For your website, you can use Spotlight to share the responses that users send to you, this can remind site visitors to participate on social media, and it can make your site look a lot more lively.
5. User-generated content (UGC)
User-generated content can help brands make more money. If you can convince your Instagram followers and a broader audience to make content for your brand in exchange for social clout or some kind of reward, you can get a lot of shareable content that you can reuse.
Adidas, for example, has millions of tagged UGC posts from customers:
That reward doesn’t have to be expensive, it can tie into contests or giveaways of your products and services (which we’ll talk about in a bit) or simply be reposted by a popular account.
To start with, we recommend asking followers to tag your brand in any posts related to your products or services. You can look through that content to find gems worth resharing and publish them on your site too using Spotlight.
6. Infographics
Infographics are popular because they enable you to cover complex topics in a way that’s easy to follow and visually pleasing. They’re almost tailor-made for social media platforms like Instagram, where people want to digest information and posts quickly.
You can work with your team to come up with interesting infographic ideas about common questions or problems that your audience has. Creating infographics requires some design skills, though, so you’ll want to work with a designer or make it yourself with Canva or a similar tool.
7. Tutorials and How-Tos
If your audience has certain pain points (related to your brand or not), they’ll appreciate guides and tutorials on how to fix them. The more common the issues or the question, the more shareable that content becomes.
The key thing with tutorial content is to not omit any steps. Show your audience precisely how to fix a problem, step by step, and keep the content as easy to follow as possible.
You can use Spotlight to display your Instagram tutorials in WordPress, which can serve as a replacement or a complement to a blog.
If you don’t have the time to create tutorials in-house, you can also use Spotlight to curate hashtags feeds of several tutorials relevant to your niche and moderate which ones make it to your site.
8. Seasonal and holiday posts
Creating seasonal content enables you to tap into the current conversations. You can make engaging holiday reels that are relatable, or Instagram posts for Black Friday that include exclusive sales and offers.
Most seasons and holidays have built-in traditions you can tap into for content ideas. With holiday content, it’s more important to be on time than it is to get everything perfect.
Create as much content as you can during the holidays to promote your feed and consider leveraging UCG to kick things up a notch. With Spotlight, you can show off all of your Instagram holiday content on your website, or aggregate posts from other sources in your niche.
Recommended: 15 Instagram Holiday Marketing Ideas to Make Your Brand Shine
9. Contest and giveaways
Contests and giveaways can get a lot of shares on Instagram if you give users a reason to share them. A lot of brands do this by offering higher chances of winning if you share their content, follow them, and tag friends to join in as well:
You can do the same and use contests and giveaways to incentivize your audience (and users beyond that) to share your content. How effective this is will depend on the rewards you offer, but some good starting ideas include discounts on your products/services or outright freebies.
To avoid issues with your followers, make sure that the rules of any contest you host are clear as day. You can showcase the best entries and winners on your feed and show off that feed on your site using Spotlight.
Embed shareable content with Spotlight
Spotlight can help you show off the amazing shareable content ideas you publish on Instagram on your site too. Our plugin enables you to create Instagram feeds and place them anywhere on your WordPress site.
You can fully customize every feed, from its layout to the design, and what content it shows on your site. It easily integrates with Instagram Business or Creator accounts and it gives you access to analytics so you can measure the impact of your Instagram content ideas.
With Spotlight, you can choose to leverage Instagram content in a lot of ways. You can create hashtag tagged, shoppable or combined feeds (from multiple Instagram accounts) that show any of these shareable content ideas.
Some Spotlight features, like hashtag and tagged feeds are only available with PRO licenses and above. There’s also a free version of Spotlight you can use which supports unlimited Instagram feeds.
Wrapping up
Creating highly shareable content for Instagram comes down to good ideas and execution. The ideas should depend on what your audience likes and the execution is the type of content you decide to make.
For highly shareable content ideas for businesses, we recommend using memes, UCG, behind-the-scenes stories, and pretty much anything that’s funny and relatable. If you can also make the content visually appealing and emotional, it’ll get shares.
If you want to start tinkering with shareable content ideas for your Instagram feed, use Spotlight to show them off on your site too.
