nstagram Reposts and Brand Awareness: The New Shortcut People Will Misuse

Passive posting is why your Instagram growth feels random.

It’s still a discovery engine, but now it only rewards things that travel: things that get saved, things that get shared, things that get reposted. For musicians and small creator brands, that’s particularly important, because the audience for discovery is rarely your direct followers – it’s their friends and acquaintances, the people they discuss things with in group chats and via story taps. The new repost feature for both Stories and feed posts reinforces this. If you think about your online presence in terms of Instagram promotion strategies, then a repost can be thought of as an additional layer of distribution that can multiply the impact of a single piece of content and turn it into 10 different engagement points. This is about building awareness for your brand – not about your engagement metrics.

What Are Instagram Repost Capabilities?

Instagram has formally turned what was an informal behaviour into a full-fledged feature – by which I mean, rather than sharing someone else’s post as a sticker preview in your Story, you can now share other people’s feed posts (and sometimes Reels) and share them as a full repost in your friends’ feeds. The repost feature allows users to share a post and it will look like a repost in the friends’ feeds with a credit going back to the original author. Creators can share a repost of a post where they’ve been tagged in it or where they’ve been given permission to share the post, depending on their account settings.

Reposting is not copying. The original post will remain the original post with privacy settings intact, repost eligibility and tagging permissions remaining unchanged. This is distinct from the old method of screen capturing and downloading a post, then re-uploading it. That way of sharing would essentially forfeit the source post’s attributes and make it impossible to track.

Impact on Brand Awareness

If your content is surfacing in new places, that’s a sign your fans are becoming more aware of your content. And posts are one of the easiest ways to “repurpose” your tour clip to “bump it into” more people’s feeds in more context that matters. When a fan posts your video, that copy is seen as an endorce – a more trustworthy form of engagement than just a standard post (like an ad).

This also kind of works in the favor of UGC as a metric. A small brand may not need a million followers to be able of prove engagement with its art, they just need evidence of the interactions that occur. The social proof part is just basic psychology: the act of re posting something means someone has chosen to risk being the subject of ridicule or judgment by re-posting it – so when you see something re posted, the assumption is that it’s something worthwhile, because someone valued it enough to risk that sort of attention. It’s a very strong network effect too: a post can be re posted, and then those re posts can be re posted, and they can also then lead to more private engagement like DMs or through Stories. The behavior breakdown of the repost feature for Instagramis a good reminder that Instagram is formalizing a dynamic that has existed for a while in the social media space, and that a fair amount of the actions that create value for an “artist brand” have been ad-hoc, with creators trying to manipulate the system in order to reach an audience.

For a small brand, building trustworthiness isn’t about having a perfect first impression, but rather about being present in as many places as possible – producer page, venue page, micro-influencer page, fan page of someone who cares about great music. The more places you show up, the less you look like a legitimate page, and more like a campaign.

Tactical Opportunities for Marketers

The most common mistake I see is teams asking for shares and wanting to see the post re posted by individuals, but they never give them anything in return. Make your content #repostable Share the following plays that actually work to grow engagement:

• Share this UGC request package: Ask fans to share a 10-second Story reaction to the chorus of your song; then, share the best reactions to encourage the positive.
• Just try this Run a repost-first drop: Share a clip in advance and announce in the snippet that a repost will unlock the next clip or the private live Today was the simple ‘just do it’ test.
• Micro-influencer swaps: send 5-10 smaller influencers a package of clear, crisp assets and let them know the direction you’d like to see them post in, as opposed to simply asking them to “share this” and getting whatever they choose to post as a result.
• Tie reposts into Highlights: the ability to showcase and collect reposted reviews, crowd videos and remix clips into a permanent proof wall.
• Watch repost patterns weekly: which hook, which caption line and which format was most re-posted.

We’ll use Artist Push to give a boost to content that is already showing engagement and resulting in organic reposts, so we’re not buying failed content.

Reposts are one of the most under-communicated and under-appreciated features on social media. Essentially, any retweet, share or re-post is a form of conversion of user engagement into a form of “social media distribution” (while preserving the original authorship of the content). By designing and thinking about reposts not as an occasional surprise but as a built-in constraint, a brand is able to scale its reach faster through content re-posted by users in multiple channels. The short term benefit is generating UGC with great social proof; the long term benefits are multiple as these networks have the potential of overlapping and providing value to the content in the form of increased discoverability. Instagram keeps moving toward an environment where first-degree friends are increasingly becoming part of one’s media buying plan.