It’s impossible to build an effective social media marketing strategy without Instagram. Instagram photos and videos play an equal role in today’s social media ecosystem for brands, influencers, and consumers alike. When it comes to feed posts, it’s especially important for brands to keep their grids relevant and up to date. That’s where Instagram’s archive feature comes in handy.
In this collection of step-by-step guides and tutorials, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about how to archive Instagram content, with special emphasis on feed posts. We’ll touch on the basics of the in-app Instagram archive, and then dive into how managing posts in particular can help brands achieve their UGC and influencer marketing goals.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why Instagram’s in-app posts archive is such a valuable feature for brands.
- How to archive, view, and unarchive Instagram posts inside the app.
- How Archive’s all-in-one influencer marketing platform is a no-brainer.
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All About Instagram’s In-App Posts Archive
The posts archive is one of Instagram’s most useful features because it works like your own private folder inside the Instagram app. Deleting a post from your feed is a permanent decision that requires you to go through all the effort of uploading again if you change your mind down the road. But archiving a post keeps it just as private without being quite so permanent.
When you archive a post on Instagram, it’s invisible to the public but still available to you. Once you’ve archived a post, you can always unarchive it to repost it to your profile page. It will appear in the same position on your grid as when you originally posted it, instead of being listed at the top of the feed like a brand new post. Unarchived posts also keep all their stats intact, which means you can pick up with your engagement exactly where you left off instead of having to start over again.
Here are some other cool parts of Instagram’s in-app archiving feature:
- Stories archive: When this feature is turned on, all the Instagram stories you post to your brand account will automatically appear in your story archive and remain available even after they expire.
- Live archive: The live archive is the third section of Instagram’s archive feature — your live Instagram videos will remain available for 30 days after you broadcast, so you can repurpose them on your own time.
Why Brands Might Want to Archive IG Feed Posts
Keeping your social media feed relevant and up to date is an important part of any brand’s marketing strategy. Disappearing content like Instagram stories don’t contribute to this problem since they only remain active for 24 hours (unless you add them to your highlights). But feed posts can cause a cluttered, disorganized brand experience if you don’t pay attention to what’s active on your Instagram grid.
Here are just a few of the reasons brands might want to use Instagram’s posts archive feature:
- Keep branding up to date: Think of your grid as a snapshot of your brand aesthetic. From your logo to your brand colors to your overall vibe, it’s important to clean up your Instagram feed each time your branding changes.
- Stay relevant and on-trend: Make sure you never fall behind the times by curating your grid. You can use the in-app posts archive to hide content that just isn’t timely or relevant anymore.
- Reflect your product line: You definitely don’t want your brand account to be dominated by content about products you no longer offer. As you update collections and change up your product line, remember to archive old posts so no one gets the wrong idea.
- Create a dramatic effect: While some brands take a long view of building their Instagram profile grid, others use it to craft elaborate images and effects one square at a time. Archiving posts is a great way to clear the decks for a major visual announcement or launch.
- Manage brand risk: Without getting too deep in the weeds, let’s just say that controversy is rampant in today’s social media world. If you need to distance yourself from influencers that don’t share your brand values anymore, it’s easy to archive posts that feature them.
How To Archive One Instagram Post At A Time
To kick off our tutorials about the posts archive, let’s look at one of the most popular FAQs about archiving Instagram posts: How do you archive Instagram posts one at a time? Here’s the five-step process:
- Open the Instagram app.
- Tap your profile picture in the bottom right corner of the app.
- Tap the feed post you want to archive.
- Tap the three-dot menu (three horizontal dots for iPhone users; three vertical dots for Android users).
- Tap Archive to remove the post from your profile feed.
This is a good option when you have one or just a few posts you want to hide from your feed. But the more posts you want to send to Instagram’s in-app archive, the more tedious this process becomes. Next, we’ll get into how to archive Instagram posts in bulk.
How To Archive All Instagram Posts At Once
As we’ve already seen, there are a lot of reasons brands might want to restart their Instagram grids from scratch. Unfortunately, there is no good way to mass Archive Instagram posts with a single button. If you need to hide a whole batch of Instagram posts or go scorched earth and archive all your Instagram posts at once, there are a few steps to the process.
With that said, you don’t have to repeat the single-post steps above for every single post in your feed. Instead, use the bulk archiving option by following these seven steps:
- Tap your profile picture in the bottom right of the Instagram app.
- Tap the ☰ menu in the upper right hand corner of your profile.
- Tap Your activity and scroll down to the Content you shared section.
- Tap Posts to open a grid of all your posted content, then tap Select in the top right corner.
- Select all the posts you want to archive by tapping on them.
- You can use the filter options at the top to find feed posts by date range or location.
- Tap Archive in the bottom left corner of the screen to hide all the selected posts from your feed.
You can also use this multi-select option to delete posts in bulk; just tap Delete in the bottom right corner of the screen in step seven instead of tapping Archive. In step four, you can select Reels or Highlights instead of Posts to bulk-archive and bulk-delete those content types.
How To View Your Instagram Posts Archive
Once you’ve started adding posts to your in-app archive on Instagram, you may want to take a look at the content you’ve hidden. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to see all your archived Instagram posts in one place:
- Open the Instagram app.
NOTE: (You need to download the mobile app from the Google Play store for Android phones or App Store for iOS iPhones. You can’t access the archive feature in a web browser). - Tap your profile icon in the bottom right corner of the app;
- Tap the ☰ menu in the top right corner of your profile.
- Tap Archive and tap the title at the top to switch between the Posts archive, Stories archive, and Live archive sections of the app.
Remember that you’re the only one who can see your posts archive. And none of your followers can see the Instagram reels, stories, or live videos that you’ve archived from your Instagram account either. From your posts archive, you can choose to show posts on your profile again, turn them into reels, check engagement stats, or delete them completely.
How To Unarchive Instagram Posts
One of the best parts of Instagram’s archive feature is that you can unarchive your old posts at any time. Unarchiving posts will send them back to your profile wherever they first appeared, instead of at the top of the feed where new posts appear. Reposting also reactivates all the engagement stats earned while the post was public.
No matter how many times you archive and repost your content, you’ll never have to start from zero when it comes to likes, comments, etc. Plus, no one will be notified that you archived or unarchived posts, since the algorithm doesn’t register reposts as new content.
Here’s how to unarchive Instagram posts:
- Tap your profile icon in the bottom right corner to open your Instagram profile.
- Tap the ☰ menu in the top right corner of the app.
- Tap Archive and select the Posts archive from the title at the top.
- Scroll through your archived posts and tap the post you want to unarchive.
- Tap the ⋯ menu in the top right corner to open a pop-up menu.
- Tap Show on profile.
Unfortunately, Instagram doesn’t currently offer a way to unarchive multiple posts at the same time. If you want to unarchive multiple posts, you’ll need to repeat this process for each one.
How To Build Your Brand’s Complete UGC Library
If you need to save all your brand’s feed posts, it’s absolutely possible to cobble together a bunch of systems through the Instagram app. When you’re ready to cover all the bases — including both your own feed posts and all the UGC that other users post about your brand — use Archive. Unlike Instagram’s in-app content saving features, Archive is an all-in-one influencer marketing platform that detects and collects all your brand’s UGC.
Every Instagram post, story, reel, and TikTok video that your brand is tagged in will appear automatically in your beautiful, intuitive content library. Then you can sort, filter, and organize to find the perfect piece of content in seconds or build custom workflows that make your marketing and influencer teams more efficient. Send usage rights requests and manage permissions right there inside Archive, and even display your best short-form video UGC on your e-commerce website with our no-code Shoppable UGC Feed.
Ready to manage your UGC better and activate more partners in less time and with no headaches? Get started with Archive today for free.
