A commenter recently asked if I believe blogs are “dead.”

I don’t, but I think their role in the online world is changing. One way to flow with blogs’ evolution at the moment is to integrate social media into your blog and vice versa.

According to Pew Research Center, the most popular social media platforms right now are YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram (It will be interesting to see if Facebook still holds second place after the recent revelations). Instagram seems to be the platform that still brings my clients and peers joy (even though it’s owned by Facebook), so let’s look at some ideas for how your blog and Instagram can play nicely together.

#1 Use your Instagram photos to illustrate your blog posts. According to this post (which is rather old, but quoted everywhere), “Articles containing relevant images have 94% more total views than articles without images on average.” And according to this piece, “people can recall 65% of the visual content that they see almost three days later. In comparison to about 10% of written content three days after it’s read.” You get the picture. Visuals are powerful.

#2 Include a link to your Instagram account in the header, footer, or sidebar of your site. I know this seems like a no-brainer, but people forget to do it.

#3 Let your Instagram followers know when you have a new post up. Create an image with the title of your blog post, or take a screenshot of the header of your blog post. Share the image with your Instagram followers with a little info about the post. Temporarily change the link in your profile to link to your blog post, and include “link in profile” or #linkinprofile in your description (e.g. Rachel Cole). You can do something similar if you have a new product, or service you’d like to share (e.g. Susannah Conway).

#4 Create a community building event that takes place on blogs and Instagram. For example, the company Phat Quarters (they sell fabric) hosted a Fabric Blog Tour to coincide with the launch of a new fabric line called “Journey” by one of their suppliers, Monaluna. During the blog tour, Phat Quarters published blog posts with links to posts by bloggers about the bags, clothes, and other items they created with the fabric line. Monaluna posted a round-up post with links to the bloggers on the Tour on its blog as well. Both companies also shared images of projects the bloggers made in their Instagram feed: (e.g. phatquarters, monaluna).

#5 Give Link.tree a whirl. I’ve never tried Link.tree, so I can’t personally recommend it, but I’ve noticed more Instagrammers using it (e.g. laladelia). Instead of putting a link to your website in your Instagram bio, link to your Link.tree profile which, when clicked, offers links to multiple places to connect with you online. One of those links could be to your blog, or to a particular blog post.

Pink skies & moonrise by bbravo

If you’d like to connect on Instagram, you’ll find me at bbravo sharing photos of sunsets, hummingbirds, and other things I find beautiful.

What are ways you’ve seen Instagram and blogs play nicely together?

Photo of a double rainbow by Abigail Keenan on Unsplash

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