How To Utilize Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories don’t require a ton of optimization, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t just start blasting them at random. They still require some planning and/ or intention. Here are some tips for successful Instagram Stories that can boost your presence on the social media platform.

Figure out your publishing frequency

A key upside of Stories is that you can publish them frequently without worrying about spamming your followers. That said, there’s no denying investment of time and resources that goes into publishing anything on a daily or near-daily basis. Consider Stories as a supplement to your regular posts without sacrificing content quality.

Once you’ve figured out the ideal publishing frequency for your Stories, follow it consistently. Additionally, it’s important to publish your Stories at the right time when people are more likely to take notice. Try to find out the best time to post to your Instagram Stories and plan your publishing schedule accordingly.

Get creative with Instagram Story features

One of the best parts about Instagram Stories is the ability to get as creative as you want. Since it offers so many cool features, tools and stickers, you can have fun with them to come up with eye-catching and original content.

For instance, the pen tool lets you draw directly on your Story. This allows you to highlight some parts of the text or even point to specific details in your photo. You can change the color and pen style as needed.

Instagram even lets you create custom ink and background colors. So you can choose the perfect shade to match your branding guidelines or creative vision.

Just choose a photo from your camera roll that contains your desired color. Then open the pen app by selecting the “Draw” icon. Tap on the color picker icon at the bottom of the screen and drag the picker to your desired color.

If you want to use this new custom color as a background color, tap and hold the screen. This will change the entire background to the color of your choice.

Leverage stickers in your Story

Instagram offers a ton of stickers that you can use to customize your Story. With these, you can add fun graphics and GIFs to jazz up your Stories.

• Location – This sticker lets you add a location tag to your Story. Tap on the sticker icon and search for the place you want to tag. Select the location and this will automatically add the location to the Story.
• @Mention – This lets you mention other accounts and users in your Story. Select the sticker and enter the username of the person or account you want to tag.
• Add Yours – The “Add Yours” sticker lets you create a prompt and add a photo based on the prompt. When other users view your Story, they can tap on the prompt to contribute their own photo.
• Questions – This lets you collect questions from your followers. Some even use this to ask a question and collect answers.
• Music – With this sticker, you can choose your favorite music to add to the Story. This is a great way to keep your Story interesting with fun audio tracks from the Instagram music library.
• Poll – This sticker lets you create a poll and provide up to four answers/options. Users can cast their vote by selecting the option they want best.
• Quiz – The quiz sticker works almost like the poll feature, except you need to select one correct answer. This is a fun way to keep your audience engaged through Stories.
• Emoji slider – The emoji slider is a type of voting sticker. You enter a prompt or question, and users have to slide the emoji to provide an answer. For example, they may share how excited they are about an upcoming launch.
• Link – This sticker lets you add an external link to your Story. Tap on the icon and enter the URL, which will appear as a link in your Story. You can customize the text that will show up in place of the naked URL.
• #Hashtag – The hashtag sticker is pretty self-explanatory. It allows you to add a hashtag to your Story, which users can tap on like a regular Instagram hashtag in feed posts.
• Countdown – This sticker lets you add a countdown timer to your Story. You can name the countdown and set an end date and time. This is perfect for counting down to an upcoming event such as a product launch or a sale.

Captions:

Instagram introduced the Stories Captions Sticker to increase the accessibility of their platform. You can add automated text captions to your stories by simply adding this sticker. It is currently only available in English-speaking countries, but Instagram plans to roll it out across different languages soon.

Shopping Sticker:

If you have Instagram Shopping set up for your business account, you can use the Shopping Sticker to add clickable product icons to your Story.

Allow users to share your Story

Speaking of other users sharing your Story, give your followers the freedom to share your Story with their friends. This would enable them to share the Story via DMs, enabling you to get more Story views.

To allow other users to share your Story, go to your Privacy settings. Select “Story” and under “Sharing,” slide on the option to allow sharing to Messages.

Take full advantage of creative features, tools and formats

Instagram is consistently rolling out new features and functions to Stories. For the sake of finding fresh opportunities to engage customers and keep up with trends, we recommend keeping a close eye on such updates. The recent updates that Instagram has implemented to compete with TikTok are a good example. For example, you can upload trending music to your Stories and cross-post your Reels.

Keep a close eye on your Instagram Stories engagement

Watching your social analytics is a no-brainer, but Stories are often treated as an afterthought when it comes to tracking data. That’s because Stories are so simple, right? What’s there to glean from a few seconds of content?

However, consider how tracking Instagram Stories analytics can clue you in on insights such as:

• Which types of Stories receive the most views, replies and engagement
• How often you should publish Stories based on firsthand data
• How engaged your total audience is versus your Stories viewers

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