The popularity of Instagram Stories is no secret. It is estimated that over 400 million people use Stories daily. In fact, Instagram has been encouraging brands and users alike to hop on the Stories bandwagon.

One of the reasons that make people prioritize Stories is that they appear on top of the feed with a purple circle around it to let users know that the content is fresh. This, coupled with the fact that they’re only available for 24 hours, creates a sense of urgency and scarcity around Stories, making them irresistible to click on.

Below are some best practices businesses can follow while making use of Instagram Stories.

Point Followers to Your Stories

Out of the 1 billion active Instagram users, only 500 million use stories! This means that while Stories are indeed popular, not everyone is using them yet. So, it is okay for businesses to let their customers know when they’ve put up fresh content on stories and ask them to check it out.

Focus on Visuals

Given the fleeting nature of Stories, brands must ensure that their content is compelling enough to keep the viewer hooked. This can be accomplished by using bright, contrasting colors in fonts or overlays, using a person’s face to make an instant emotional connection, or capturing interesting or unfamiliar settings to keep it interesting.

Clear & Legible Text

Although this point is a no-brainer, it’s worth mentioning. It is essential that any text included in the photo or video clip is clear and legible to viewers. While it’s fun to play around with fonts and colors, care must be taken not to use clashing

colors or incoherent font that might be difficult to read. Similarly, a Story overcrowded with text is also unpleasant to look at and can make viewers lose interest in the content.

How-To’s and Tutorials

The sequential format of Stories makes them perfect for step-by-step, how-to-style content. From furniture assembly, beauty tutorials, recipes, and DIYs, bite-sized educational content is an engaging alternative to traditional video or blog posts.

Sharing User-Generated Content (UGC)

Brands often share their followers’ user-generated content on their stories and tag the individuals. When businesses don’t want UGC to dominate their main feed but don’t want to waste valuable shout-outs and reviews from their followers either, Stories are the best place to make use of them.

Behind-the-Scenes Stories

Many companies use stories to show their customers glimpses of their behind-the-scenes workings and day-to-day operations. Stories allow companies to take their followers along for the ride and make them feel more connected to the brand by sharing the human side of their business.

Time-Sensitive Offers, Deals, and Promos

Similar to the Instagram feed, Stories can also be used for exclusive, limited-time deals. Story-specific offers are a great way to get people to constantly click on a brand’s Instagram stories as they never know when they might come across an exclusive deal or offer.

Run a Stories Ad

Instagram’s hyper-targeted ad platform via Stories has proven to be very successful for many brands out there. This feature allows brands to use 10 photos or videos and has a full-screen format that is truly unique in terms of formatting and keeping the target audience’s attention. All in all paid Stories are like a bite-sized commercial for brands and have proved to be very useful.

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