I know you know that Insta Stories are a big deal. Over 400 million people use Insta Stories every day! From branded content to question stickers to silly filters, there’s a way for everyone to use Insta stories for their personal or professional brand.
And If you are not actively utilizing the Insta stories feature, you need to quickly shift gears! Think of it as an extension to your main feed, or even as its own feed entirely! Whenever you add to your Insta story, your followers see that purple circle over your profile pic, telling them you recently uploaded. If you are as obsessed with engagement as we are, you know that having people see your stories helps big time with your overall engagement rate on Instagram.
There’s also the fact that stories only last for 24 hours. Now we have that sense of urgency to view a story so that we don’t miss any content! Think of someone you follow that you look up to. Whenever they upload a story, are you not right away watching what they posted? Now, let’s flip it to your followers or the people that look up to you. Yea, they are anxiously awaiting your posts as well! Below, I’ve listed just a few but powerful ways to amp up your Insta stories and drive engagement
Insta Stories: Create Mode
Instagram Stories Create mode has tons of options for you to engage with your audience in unique ways! Choose from one of their many polls and encourage your followers to play along. Or, test out some of their template options like Quote of the Day or top accounts to follow. Create mode is a great feature to use, especially if you don’t have other content to share, but still want to get that daily engagement in. And it’s VERY important to upload to stories every day. As overall engagement increases your chances of showing on someone’s feed based on the algorithm, the more chances you have to let your audience engage, the better it is in the long run.
Insta Stories: Poll Sticker
Mentioned in the Create mode, the Poll sticker is a great way to be both silly and professional with your audience, depending on your branding. If you want your follower’s opinion on certain coffee flavors, fabric colors, movie genres, etc., the poll sticker is easy to share and you can also see who played along on the insights tab of your story.
Insta Stories: Go Live
Yet another way to encourage engagement and get your followers to comment is through the Live feature for Insta Stories. This also works well if you want to go live with another person, as the feature allows you to share the screen with another person if you so choose. Once an Instagram Live is done, you have the option to save it for 24hours on your story or to download it to your phone for your records.
Pro tip: Hours, or even a day leading up to going live, you can make announcements to your followers through Insta stories and even add a countdown sticker. This is just another way to hype up the audience and hopefully get as many people as possible watching your Instagram Live.
Insta Stories: Swipe Up
If you have over 10k followers, this is one of the best features Insta stories has to offer for businesses and creatives alike. The swipe up feature allows your followers to quickly get from your stories to a link to are trying to direct them to. And if you are under 10k, you can still say “link in bio” and direct your followers to your profile page to click on the link.
To learn more about Instagram and Insta stories, check out our services page and view our coaching options!