Canva Hack: How to Repurpose Old Content You Created for Instagram
Are you tired of constantly creating new content for your Instagram account? We get it.
You have spent precious time, literal hours, creating content for Instagram, only to have to do it over and over again. But, what if we told you that you don’t always have to spend hours creating NEW content to be effective at marketing your small business on Instagram??
Repurposing old content can be a great way to save time and effort while maintaining a consistent brand message and aesthetic. You can take old posts and make them new… or you can simply republish some of your top performing content.
You might be thinking… “ok that’s great, I hear about content repurposing all the time, but how do I actually do that?”
And our answer: With Canva, of course!
With Canva, it's easy to create engaging Instagram posts from old content. You can set up your Canva, your designs, your folders, and individual posts in a way that is EASY to come back and repurpose them for your Instagram!
Why Repurpose Old Content for Instagram?
Before we dive into how to actually use Canva for repurposing content, let’s chat about WHY repurposing content for Instagram is so important.
Maintaining a consistent brand message and aesthetic is key to building a strong presence on Instagram. But constantly creating new content can be time-consuming and overwhelming, especially for small business owners and social media managers with limited resources.
Repurposing old content is a great way to fill content gaps and keep your feed fresh without having to start from scratch. And since not all of your followers may have seen your content the first time around, repurposing old content can help you reach new audiences as well.
Best Practices for Repurposing Content on Instagram
And again, before we dive into the nitty gritty, here are some best practices to keep in mind when repurposing old content for Instagram. These are rules that we use and stick to when publishing older content.
Review Your Top Performing Posts + Analytics
Before you pick just any post to publish or recreate on Instagram, take a look at your top performing posts, and the analytics of the posts you want to reuse. We personally love to look back at our:
Most liked posts, and republish almost the exact content (*maybe* making a few minor tweaks or updates to the design or caption)
Most saved posts, to figure out how we can dive deeper or re-create. For example, if a Reel was saved a lot, can we take the information and do a deeper dive in an educational carousel. Or maybe we had a feed post with a longer caption get saved a ton, can we turn it into a Reel
Most shared posts, and see if we can add to them. For example maybe we created a quote and posted it as a static image. We can create that post in multiple different colors and post it as a carousel to increase the number of shares
How to Choose the Right Content to Repurpose
Not all content is suitable for repurposing. That trending audio that you did a lip sync to a few months back - not ideal. That carousel you created talking about a pop culture event - not ideal. Choose content that is evergreen, meaning it's still relevant and useful to your audience months and months down the line, and doesn’t have an expiration date.
How We Repurpose Old Content For Instagram Using Canva
We have our Canva and workflow setup in a way that it is easy for us to review old content and find a way to make it new again. Follow the steps below to make sure your Canva account is optimized for repurposing content.
Create Canva Templates + Make Copies
We obviously love to use our own templates from Your Template Club to create content easily for Instagram. So anytime we use a template, we create our own copy, we customize them with our branding, and we begin creating evergreen content inside of that design. We then have an entire Canva folder dedicated to “our copies” of templates and designs that we can use over and over again.
Create Folders for Your Social Media Posts
We have a folder labeled “Social Media” inside of Canva. And within that folder we have a few subfolders: A yearly folder, a monthly folder, and designs for social media for each platform we create on. By labeling and organizing your designs and folders in Canva, it is easy to go back and find content and reuse it in the future.
Label Your Designs
Within each Canva design we like to label the slides with the date they were posted on. This helps when going back through analytics and reviewing top performing posts. We are able to see when they were posted, determine if enough time has gone by, and we can re-use that Instagram post again.
Video Tutorial: How we Use Canva To Repurpose Content for Instagram
Repurposing old content for Instagram using Canva is a great way to save time and effort while maintaining a consistent brand message and aesthetic. By choosing the right content to repurpose, optimizing for the Instagram platform, and measuring success, you can create engaging Instagram posts that reach new audiences and keep your followers engaged.
So why not give it a try and see how repurposing old content can benefit your Instagram strategy?
create Engagement-worthy instagram content in canva
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Manu Muraro is the founder of Your Social Team, an Instagram training membership and template shop that help social media managers and Instagram-savvy small business owners to grow engagement and sales using Instagram and content marketing, without the overwhelm. Born and raised in Brazil, Manu moved to the U.S. in 2000 right out of college to work for Cartoon Network, where she made an award winning career in creative and strategy. In 2021, Manu started Your Template Club, a Canva template subscription service to help social media professionals and Canva-savvy business owners to create content that performs on Instagram, add more Instagram features into their strategy, such as Instagram Lives and Reels, and save time.