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5 Tips For Higher Engagement With Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories Tips

Instagram Stories should be a part of your social media marketing strategy. Stories and Reels have both become very popular elements of the app. The Stories feature of Instagram occupies that key, top of the feed real estate. It can be a great way to connect and engage with your audience.

Many brands and users are just re-posting their regular feed posts to Stories, which Instagram says users don’t particularly like. They state, “We’ve seen from research that people prefer to see original photos and videos in Stories from the people they care about.” So what are you doing to utilize Stories and to increase your engagement on Instagram? Here are five tips you can begin to incorporate.

Show Up in Real Time

A good social media strategy will include a lot pre-determined content. The Stories features gives you the opportunity to connect with your audience in the moment. Be authentic. Share photos and videos of your day. Highlight some of the things that are going on behind the scenes of your company. You can also utilize stories to share your story, how you got started, who you enjoy working with, why you do what you do, etc.

Utilize The Full Screen

Regular Instagram posts in the feed show up on just a fraction of the screen. Even when you share a regular post to your Story, it takes up only a part of the screen. On organic IG Stories, the media takes up the whole screen. Why not use all that real estate to highlight your product or service? Zoom in on the details and let customers know what you’re working on! You can create tutorials and become a leader in your industry.

Use Stories Features

Incorporating Stickers and text over your photo or video in Stories has a higher probability of a user engaging with the piece of content. Add text to encourage users to take action, like a promotion or sale. Stickers, like Poll, Survey and Questions, allow you to instigate engagement from your audience, while other Stickers like Music, allow you to overlay your Story to a track that fits your messaging.

Expand Your Reach

Checking in with the location feature and utilizing hashtags in your Stories will help expand your reach to users who may not be following your account. Did you know that when you 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. 

Save to Highlights

Instagram Stories stay up for just 24 hours. The only way to avoid this is to save them to your Highlights.  When you do this, the Story will stay there until you decide to take it down, if you ever do. You have the opportunity to highlight your Stories by topic or category. You can create branded covers for those Highlights, whether it’s your company’s colors or titles for each Highlight.

As Stories continues to grow it’s presence on the Instagram platform, creating a strategy will allow your brand to reach and engage with potential customers who go to Stories first before scrolling their feed. With the algorithm always changing, having content at the top of the feed in Stories will help your brand stay in the forefront. Contact us today if you have questions on how you can use Instagram Stories to grow your business.