Despite their 24 hour shelf life, your Instagram Stories should tell a story. 

With 300 million instagrammers using the feature daily, and a 15% greater engagement rate than traditional posts. There’s no doubt you should be creating great content for your stories.

The 24 hour shelf life means that stories don’t have to be as polished as posts. In fact that’s one of the reasons, they have a greater engagement rate.  There’s much less opportunity for tweaking, filtering, altering and fixing a picture or video, making them more relateable to your followers.

Stories are every influencer’s dream. 

But you should be smart about what you’re posting. Ultimately you want to use stories to drive traffic, increase your post engagement and to up your following.

 

BEST PRACTICES FOR INSTAGRAM STORIES

 

Use Instagram’s features extensively

• Tag all your posts using #hashtags, and Geotags.  Being searchable by location and hashtag, means that anyone can see your stories. If you get enough people to engage with your story, you may even end up on the “explore page”.
• Get creative.  Use instagram’s polls, filters, different font texts, drawing and animated gifs, to give your story an interactive, engaging and fun factor.

 

 

 

Stories should be telling

Followers  favour videos more than images on instagram stories. Unlike traditional posts, in which pictures receive 31% more engagement than videos.

Videos may be more time consuming to create, but the good news is Instagram Stories is a pretty relaxed place in general. And the quality standards are pretty low.

Your main goal is to tell a story, no matter how you tell it, whether structured or unstructured: 

Structured videos include:

• Tutorials
• Q&A sessions
• Reviews
• Teasers

Unstructured videos:

• Live stories.  Streaming events are always a good way to grab your followers attention. You also get a helping hand from Instagram, since it notifies your followers when you are live streaming.
• Daily routines
• Capturing the moment

 

 

Sponsored posts

When working with brands it’s important to drive your followers from your stories, to their site.

 

Before you post – Create a sense of anticipation

• Post content which gets your audience excited for something upcoming and new, by providing a deeper insight into the brand collaboration with teasers. Ask your audience to stay tuned, for the release of new sponsored content, this way diverting them to your traditional Instagram posts,  increasing your engagement.

During your Collaboration – Create a sense of urgency

• Entice followers to monitor your story closely by sharing special offers and discount codes or announcing a giveaway or contest via your stories.

After your Collaboration – Create a sense of relativity

• Share how you fit the brand in your daily life; since stories only have a shelf life of 24 hours, use this feature to integrate branded content, or products in clippets of your life. Bringing the product you promoted in your feed, to life, in a much more real form, without blatantly pointing it out.

 

 

 

Always include a CTA

You must always, without fail include a call to action redirecting your followers to your posts, a link or to a brand’s landing page.

• Add the link directly in your story, and nudge your followers to swipe up to view the link. The swipe up feature is only available for all business Instagram accounts with 10,000 or more followers.
• Divert them to your Instagram page, by telling them to check out your posts or the link in your bio.

 

Understanding your audience is key to creating better content, and telling better stories. When you create a media kit with ZINE you have access to Instagram audience insights, which gives you a deeper understanding of your fans’ likes and dislikes, their age, gender and location, but also their income. Create your free media kit, and immediately unveil who your audience really is.