Social media is changing all the time, and every day it seems like theres always a new feature or function you can use to further make your social profiles stand out. I’m not going to cover them all, today I’m going to share some advice on how to rock your Instagram Stories with a few Instagram Story tips, to help increase your growth, reach, engagement and ultimately your conversions from- and this isn’t a generic list on how to change colours or any basic capabilities you can do on Instagram.
Instagram Stories have now surpassed all snapchat activity (over 200 million users) so it’s now or never to start stepping up your social game. Below are my tips to help boost your Insta Story game, and they are by no means the official authority on Instagram Stories. These are just helpful hints, that have helped me grow to nearly 30,000 followers in a year.
Being upfront I wasn’t born with all the knowledge to rock social media, I have worked in Public Relations and Social Media for 8 years so have learnt a lot on the job, and I’ve also had my fair share of other bloggers and influencers helping me out by sharing knowledge and tips – so my so-called door is always open, if you ever have questions or need advice, follow me on instagram or other social media, or head to my blog The One Hit Wander and shoot me an email and I’ll try and answer your questions or help you out any way I can.
Before we start – I usually average between 500-900 viewers per Instagram story – and some of the images I have used below to demonstrate have been taken as screenshots from Story Highlights – which don’t show to the total true value of viewers (see Tip 5 for further explanation).
If you follow the below Instagram Story tips, you should see your views gradually increase, my latest stories are garnering views of 1k plus, like my last ones at the famous Naruto whirlpools!
Use can use the page jumps below if you want to skip ahead.
Tip #1 – ALWAYS use GeoLocation Stickers
Tip #2 – How and why to use multiple hashtags – and not just one!
Tip #3 – Change Up Your Text Style For Good Reason
Tip #4 – Tag Accounts & Make Sure You Engage with Them Regularly
Tip #5 – Share Your Insta Stories – Online and by Word of Mouth
Tip #6 – Content Is King – and Not All for the Same Thing!
Tip #7 – Increase Engagement with Polls
Tip #8 – Highlight Your Personality, GIFs, Stickers Etc.
Tip #9 – Use Revealing Stories for Serious CTA’s (Calls to Action)
Tip #10 – Multiple Uploads Ability – Not Always the Best
Bonus – Tip #11 up Your Game with Quality Branded Story Content
Alright, lets jump in!
Why Use Instagram Stories?
This is pretty basic to understand but if you don’t know why, here’s some short and sweet reasons:
- Increased reach – the reach of Instagram is the highest for any public account, and you have far greater chances of reaching new audiences than on other social media platforms.
- Easier to access
- Easier to engage with (less clicks)
- Jumps you to the top of the screen – a great workaround to the feed algorithm which no longer shows posts in chronological order, but by engagement rate.
- Be discovered by audiences using geolocations and hashtags in real time.
How To Use Instagram Stories?
I’m not going to go into detail how to actually add an Instagram story, as being a social media user, a blogger, aspiring influencers or social gurus already, you should understand how to add an Instagram story.
You don’t have to film or capture content live – nearly 100% of the time, my Instagram story content is from days, weeks and months past. Simply edit or redownload the content to your phone – where it will show up in the last 24 hours when you click the icon in the bottom left hand side or some phones you swipe up from the bottom to access content from the last 24 hours.
Tip #1 – ALWAYS Use GeoLocation Stickers
This is my biggest piece of advice and the most important Instagram Story tip! To add a geolocation sticker, click on the square happy face in the top right corner of your screen, and choose location. Once you’re here, just choose your location or search for a location (remember you don’t have to tag your physical location – in my case I tag the location where the content was filmed or I choose prominent locations that are crowded or have large populations, as you are more likely to be discovered using geolocations). Remember you can only choose one location, so choose wisely.
Now here’s why: Using a geolocation sticker, your engagement will can potentially double compared to the use without using geolocation. See my results below.
The first image (on the left), I used a location to tag a prominent location – Osaka Castle. In less than 20 minutes I had racked up over 400 views. As this location is both prominent and quite large, the story doesn’t just show up under one location, but in this instance 4 different location stories. This is the reason sometimes I usually tag a prominent busy location e.g. think Sydney Harbour Bridge, Flinders Street Station etc, there are a lot of other busy prominent surrounding locations, therefore increasing your chance for your content to be shared in other close by locations stories.
The second image on (on the right) is an instagram story without a location sticker. This night I posted 4 stories, the first two using locations, the last two without location stickers. You can see that is has nearly 50% of the views of the story with a tagged location. I’ve tested this multiple times, and at the time of writing this (and until the algorithm changes) location stickers will ALWAYS help you get more views!
Tip #2 – How and Why to Use Multiple Hashtags – and Not Just One!
Most people who post Instagram stories will simply write a caption and then use the hashtag sticker (found in the same area where the location sticker is) – and this is a missed opportunity. In the text field you can write multiple hashtags, not just one single hashtag, and you can also include a sticker hashtags. Multiple use of hashtags will allow you to be discovered by audiences, and to be shown in more hashtag stories. Just don’t go too overboard (this was an example image, not how I would normally post) as your audience will interpret your content as spammy and slightly amateurish.
You can see from the third image (on the right) that my story using a hashtag in my text and a hashtag sticker allowed me to be featured in two separate hashtag stories, displaying my content to a wider audience – and if it is engaging content, this will lead them to your profile where, if you have an engaging feed, it will convert them to a follower.
Tip #3 – Change up Your Text Style for Good Reason
You should know how to add text, but if you dont, simply click on the top right corner on the “Aa” icon and start writing. Once you’re finished writing, you can tap to change the alignment and style as well as the highlight options. You can also selectively choose a unique colour by long pressing on one of the colour circles which will bring up an eye dropper tool (sorry, I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about basic text colour stuff). Mixing up your text styles also helps to show off you personality, and make your content different, to ensure eyeballs actually read what you’re writing – and getting them to follow your call to action. Repetition breeds boredom, and changing your text makes your audience pay closer attention so they can read what you’re writing.
You can be as creative as you want, just try to make your content look different, appealing, cute stunning or unique and play around with different ways to get your message across. For example, I personally love cursive writing, so I try mixing up drawing with text to create a unique looking message ( see below).
Tip #4 – Tag Accounts & Make Sure You Engage with Them Regularly
Another Instagram Story tip to engage with brands (if you’re an aspiring blogger or influencer) is to engage with brands via tags. As well as writing hashtags in text, you can tag an account by writing an ‘@‘ symbol and then their username, e.g. I recently uploaded stories and tagged @vegemite. Tagging an account sends them a notification – and as a blogger/influencer, this is a good way to show you are engaging and promoting a brand or product – and help you down the track with sponsorships/advertising etc. Remember, brands aren’t stupid, so you need to engage with them across the board, not just on single instagram stories. A few months ago I spent a week solid traveling and as well as posting Instagram stories tagging Jetstar several times, I also tagged them on individual posts. This constant mass of engaging helped me to get promoted by Jetstar on their own Instagram page. Yew!
Tip #5 – Share Your Insta Stories – Online and by Word of Mouth
This might sound basic, but once you have linked your other social accounts to Instagram, when posting an Instagram Story you have the ability to share it to other social platforms, e.g. you can share it as a Facebook Story. This then helps you add content to Facebook as well as drive your Facebook audience to Instagram.
Secondly – talk about your Instagram stories. I assume a lot of you talk to people every day and tell them what you have been up to, so do what I do, and subtly mention what you have been up to and how to find it online – this is where you add in “Check out my Instagram stories…”.
Living and working in Japan, I get up to so much, and get to see so many incredible things, and usually when I converse with friends or other foreigners I meet, I always mention what I’ve been up to – and that they can check out it on my Instagram Stories. Basically is just plugging yourself, but hey, it gets eyeballs and followers!
Lastly related to sharing – you have the ability to create Instagram Highlights – which hover underneath your profile and is a must-do Instagram Story tip. Create categories and save only your best stories that promote you, your brand and what you do, as these stories will stay there. You will also notice, that over time the total audience for each story saved to a highlight will look lower than when originally posted within the 24 hours – this is because after the 24 hours, your story content will no longer rank in location or hashtag stories that you tagged using stickers and hashtags in text. So don’t stress. If you want to track your actual story data, you can screenshot it within the 24 hour period, as if you screenshot it at a later time from a saved highlight (like my three images under Tip 3, and most of the screenshots used in this article) they will all show lower views, compared to the actual views that occurred during the initial 24 hour period.
Tip #6 – Content Is King – and Not All for the Same Thing!
One of my other biggest pieces of advice to friends trying to increase eyeballs on their Instagram stories is twofold. One, create engaging content – and this doesn’t have have to be high quality content, this can be ‘a day in the life of’, behind the scenes, or anything cute, interesting or something you genuinely think your audience would like to see. Don’t just share meaningless content for the sake of it. Trust me, it will only hurt you in the long run and will make it harder for your audience to trust in your content if they have been turned off it. As an example, I don’t post Instagram stories everyday. I’m a self-confessed Instagram addict, yet I probably post maybe 2-3 or maximum 5 Instagram stories a week. Some weeks I post none. Take a customer point of view, and make sure your content passes the ‘worth viewing’ test before posting.
Second point – and this is probably the most important relating to the category of content – and that is, don’t use all the same content for the same thing. Don’t post an Instagram image and use the same, or visually similar image for a story. Its a waste of your audiences time, and if they didn’t like and engage with your post, they wont with your stories. What do I do instead you ask? Easy peasy – make your content for Instagram stories exclusive! This is the tactic I use, and it works well for me, and for most other bloggers I have met. As an example, I recently went to an Otter Cafe in Japan where you can actually play with otters! I know, amazing right, and this is stuff that audiences would love to see – but this is where, before hitting that post button, you think about content strategy, and Im hoping that all or most of you all work off content strategies.
Here is a quick workflow strategy for this content of Otter Cafes that I would follow, not just spraying it all over social media.
As an example, heres a basic content workflow:
- Post Instagram Story exclusive video content
- Following day – Generic-ish Instagram Post with a call to action to view my story for the full videos of total cuteness! E.g My image above, this is an otter photo from the zoo I went to recently, NOT the otter cafe – but the content relates to my exclusive-content Instagram story. See what I’m doing here?!
- Few Days Later – second Instagram Story of exclusive featuring Otter Cafe
- A week later – Blog/YouTube Post
- Following Day – Third Instagram story or Instagram post.
If your goal is to drive traffic to a website, then step four is moved up a bit.
During the first week, anyone you encounter, you would naturally be talking about your awesome visit to the Otter Cafe, and that they can view it only on your Instagram stories. Your digital audience will also start to notice this behaviour over time, and know that your Instagram content will be the place to view limited-time great content, therefore to click on your stories when they pop up, otherwise they will miss out and have to settle for your normal great content on your feed.
Tip #7 – Increase Engagement with Polls
Under the sticker section (where you find location and hashtag stickers) you will also find the ability to use Polls. Polls are a great way to not only engage your audience, but also to learn about your audience – what they like, what they want.
One of my travel blogging friends Kristina does this amazingly. In the first picture below (on the left) you can see how she uses polls to create general fun engagement with her audience. She also regularly posts Instagram stories with polls asking her followers what to eat for lunch, what to wear etc. and showing her followers they have input into her content. I sometimes use Polls to ask questions, not so much relevant to influence content, but to increase engagement and clicks (second image, centre).
Secondly, you can also use Polls to drum up excitement or engage your audience prior to directing them to your call to action, or as a method of market research to find out what they want. I regularly get asked questions about editing and filters for my photos, so I did a series of before and afters using my Lightroom presets, and did a series of polls to see if my followers were interested – low and behold they were. Following these polls, I offered one of my presets as a free downloadable on my blog, and used stories and polls to try the audience to my sight where they could download my Lightroom preset, and I can capture user data (which helped grow an additional 100 email subscribers in a few weeks). Win-win!
PS if you want my awesome Lightroom preset for free, go subscribe on my blog hehe
Tip #8 – Highlight Your Personality with GIFs, Stickers Etc.
Again, under the stickers section you’ll find the ability to add general stickers (further swiping down, or swipe right) as well as the ability to a GIFs. A few months ago Instagram removed GIFs due to a racial GIF controversy, but this has been sorted and we can all now use GIFs again!
Stickers and GIFs are a great way to show your personality and add an additional element to your content – simply enter text in the search bar after clicking the GIF option and search for the perfect GIF to match your content. You can also be more creative with GIFs, stickers and text, by long pressings and clipping them to appear at certain times during your content. I can’t post photos here that show you examples, but if you look through my story highlights, or most stories from big Instagram influencers you will see the use of GIFs. Another tip a lot of bigger Influencers use is when you have a new Instagram post you want to drive traffic to, screenshot your photo, upload it as a story and cover your latest post with a GIF – telling your audience to click through to your profile and engage with your latest post (you can see an example below). I do this sometimes if I post at odd hours and am not receiving quick engagement to drive my post to rank higher, but I don’t do this with every post, as remember it will only annoy your audience and they will soon stop viewing any of your stories – so do with moderation people.
#9 – Use Revealing Stories for Serious CTA’s (Calls to Action)
When uploading stories and you want to drive serious traffic and calls to action, using revealing content stories is a great way to get your message across and make your audience engaged.
I did a collaboration with Daniel Wellington, and so to post stories that drive traffic I used revealing content as seen below. The first image had only text, and my second story used the same image, but with text that overlayed the original, making it appear as if new parts of the content is revealed. This method makes your audience subconsciously look for what is different as the image stayed the same, therefore making them actually read your clear CTA. It works people and is good. Again, like Tip 8, don’t flood your stories with this method as doing this too much has the same spammy feel – all in moderation.
Tip #10 – Multiple Uploads Ability – Not Always the Best
Instagram recently launched the ability to upload multiple photos and videos to your story, allowing you to edit all your stories and then upload in one go. Sounds great, sounds like a time saver. That’s right – the key word here is timesaver. And like all social media, it’s gamified, meaning the more you use the platform the more you get out of it. So whilst it can be handy to upload all at once (especially when travelling, or you know you will have no WiFi, or your battery is about to die), try to refrain from always using this tactic.
Secondly, if you upload lets say 4 stories all at once – these 4 stories disappear together after 24 hours. Why not post 2, then 12 hours later, or the next day post the following 2 stories – allowing you a constant stream of stories, and ensuring you are at the top of the feed of your audience.
Bonus – Tip #11 – Up Your Game with Quality Branded Story Content
ThisInstagram Story tip is for those that are a bit more tech savvy, or those that are willing to learn, to be able to step up the quality of their content output.
Branded story content is basically what it sounds like. As an example, I post lots of Instagram stories, but when I want to dive traffic to my website or for specific CTA’s, I will use quality content produced through Photoshop or Lightroom, ensuring that your story appears high quality and a little more professional, compared to on the go, regular slightly grainy Instagram stories.
If you’re a photoshop gun, go ahead and make templates and use them for serious story content to drive traffic to your website, YouTube or wherever you want to go.
If you’re not that adept at Photoshop there are templates out there you can buy, or stay tuned, as in the next month or so, Im planning to giveaway some free templates on my own blog, to help other bloggers out.
What does high quality branded story content look like? Take a look below.
In Photoshop, I have created a few of my own templates, and have plans to make more creative designs, and it’s these templates I drop my images and text into before sending to my phone to upload as a story. Always remember to leave room for hashtag and location stickers when following this method.
This content works well for saved Instagram Stories, as any viewers to your old Story Highlights will see high quality content, and it gives reassurance to your audience as to the quality of your website.
Basically thats a few Instagram Story tips, there’s lots more out there, and as I mentioned, I am not the foremost authority on Instagram or Instagram Stories – these are just some of the tips Ive learnt, and that have helped my grow and increase my engagement.
I know after reading all this, you are probably tired of looking at MY content and screenshots, but if you appreciate it, you love to follow other travelers, or you want to stay connected, jump on Instagram and follow me at @TheOneHitWander
As always if you have any questions or need advice or help with a specific issue, jump online and connect with me, or hit up my blog and drop me an email.
Hope this helps!!
– Marc a.k.a The One Hit Wander
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The post How to rock Instagram Stories like the Influencer You Are!! appeared first on The One Hit Wander.
