According to TechCrunch, as of January this year, roughly 500 million users were posting Stories each and every day (and it’s safe to assume that number has gone up). This feature isn’t just used for personal profiles; your brand stands to gain a lot from them too. If you want to find success here, keep scrolling for our top Instagram Story tips that’ll help you up your view counts and ultimately raise more awareness for your profile and brand.
Stories have become more savvy and powerful over the months and today, they can be an incredible tool to grow your brand on Instagram. However, like everything else online, this takes careful strategy.
Here are 5 Instagram Story tips you should implement in your social media marketing planning.
1. Use Hashtags and Location Tags to Expand Your Reach
Let’s start with hashtags – you’ve likely already seen how in your regular Instagram posts, adding hashtags often brings you more likes, comments and views. This is because it makes your post more visible and easily accessible to people who aren’t yet following you.
Well, the same rule actually applies with Instagram Stories. One of the best Instagram Story tips we can give you is to add one or two hashtags to your Stories. Don’t go crazy and add 10. You can easily get away with this in a regular post. In Stories, your real estate is much more limited.
If you don’t like the way hashtags look on your Story, try hiding them under a sticker! You can add these with text or the hashtag sticker.
Did you know that when you also add your location to your regular Instagram posts, it improves performance? You might very well experience the same thing when you add a location to your IG Stories, so get experimenting! This is also available under the stickers.
2. Save Important Stories to Your Highlights
Instagram Stories only stay up for 24 hours. The only way to avoid this is to save them to your Highlights (as seen below).
When you do this, the Story will stay there until you decide to take it down, if you ever do. Don’t stop there, though. Create some consistency with your Highlights by giving them a “cover” that goes with your brand. There are plenty of design suites and templates to help you do this.
Highlights make it so you get the best of both worlds. You can tap into the power of Instagram Stories and hang on to those Stories for more than 24 hours. Win! Try organising your Highlights by topic, so they’re easy for your followers to navigate.
3. Post Consistently
One of the reasons Stories are so powerful is that they put you at the very top of people’s news feeds and in realtime. To reiterate, your Stories will disappear from the top of the page after 24 hours, even if you save them to your Highlights. This means if you want to stay up there, you need to be posting a new Story regularly. We would suggest posting at least once a day.
You already know that consistency is key when it comes to your social media and your Instagram Stories are no exception. Using the feature once a week isn’t going to produce many results, so make it a regular habit and you’ll reap the rewards.
4. Increase Engagement by Using the Interactive Stickers
People love an opportunity to join in on the conversation. This is why inviting them to share their thoughts with you can be so helpful. Thankfully, IG Stories make this easy.
Under your stickers, there are five options you should check out:
- Poll
- Questions
- Quiz
- Chat
- The slider
All five of these invite the user to participate and engage with you in some capacity. They give people a reason to stop, take a closer look and share their opinion. Instagram’s clever algorithm will always prioritise content that is encouraging conversation and using these interactive stickers in your stories consistently will guarantee a higher view count.
5. Use Stories to Send Traffic Back to Your Site
Social media is a tool to ideally send people back to your website. That’s where the magic usually happens right?
The easiest way to do this with Stories is by using the ‘swipe up’ feature. This is where you can add a link and when people swipe up, IG will send them to that page. However, you need at least 10,000 followers to have access to this feature. Most of us don’t have 10,000+ followers. Then what?
Answer: The link you use in your bio becomes even more crucial.
In your Stories (and your regular posts, for that matter), you should always direct people’s attention to the link in your bio, when applicable. But take note: IG only gives you that one link. That’s the only clickable link you get on your page. Even if you type a URL out in full in a post or Story, it will not be clickable!
Thankfully, there are third-party services you can use that will give you one ‘master’ link to put in your bio. When people click that, they’ll be taken to a page with a list of links you can provide. In other words, you won’t be limited to just one. Crisis averted! Check out ours here and create your own.
Summary
While there are many tips to create the perfect instagram story, by sticking to the 5 tips given above, you can guarantee an increased amount of viewers on your instagram stories and more importantly – more visitors to your profile and website!
At South Coast Social, we’re a team of experienced content creators and social media advertising experts who specialise in bringing your brand and personality to life online. Contact us today and allow us to take care of all of your social media needs for you.
