How to use Instagram stories to engage your audience

Instagram’s stories is often called the disappearing story feature, but don’t let the fact that it disappears after 24 hours fool you.  Instagram stories is a great way to capture your digital target audience and avoid clogging up your carefully created Instagram profile with not so relative stories.

Often your audience and followers may like to see what else is going on with your brand or get a sort of behind the scenes view of who they’re following, this is where Instagram stories must be a part of any social media marketing strategy.

With an impression count of one billion daily active users, Instagram has certainly become one of the most important social media marketing tools. And the Instagram stories offers another cool way to engage your audience and create a lot of opportunities to gain more followers.

To keep up to date with Instagram and other social media marketing trends it’s a great idea to complete a social media marketing course.

Instagram page vs Instagram stories

So, what’s the difference between an Instagram post and an Instagram story?  Which one is better? How do you know which approach to take for your social media marketing campaigns?

The first thing you need to take into account when considering these questions is that get followers through your Instagram feed, in other words from posting on your profile page.  So, using the Instagram feed as a starting point is an important part of getting the most out of your digital marketing efforts on Instagram.

In a nutshell, Instagram stories should be used to complement and not replace your Instagram feed.  Instagram stories are an entertaining way to grab your audience’s attention, which should never be overlooked in your social media marketing campaigns.

How to use Instagram stories

Instagram stories were launched in 2016 and since then have become a very popular part of social media marketing and definitely are a great tool to engage your audience.  But as with every social media marketing strategy there are best practices and proven strategies that must be taken into account when building your Instagram stories platform.

There are only two ways of adding your content to Instagram stories, which are via your profile page and the second way is by navigating to your main feed and clicking on the camera icon.

Engaging your audience with Instagram stories

A staggering amount of 500 million people use Instagram stories every day, that is mind-blowing.  Another really encouraging fact is that one in five stories receives a direct message from their audience. Now that is a powerful engagement.

Here are some tips for creating great Instagram stories:

• Keep it short – Short and sweet is key yet valuable. Do include a strategic headline.
• Keep text to a minimum –Avoid cramming your Instagram story with too much text or subtitles which can quite easily ruin great content.
• Don’t come across over selling – Do not include excessive promotional text.  Your story should be entertaining, and any selling point should be subtle.

Building your Instagram stories audience

The absolute beauty of Instagram stories is the variety of content that can be used in your story, which brings endless possibilities to get your message across and engage your audience.  You can now share videos, images, time-lapses, live streams and boomerangs.

Types of Instagram stories

The world of social media marketing is always evolving – this trend is no different with Instagram stories and it can be a confusing when starting out which type of Instagram story to use.

The main goal of your story is to cut through the ever-increasing noise on Instagram to not only build your audience but to increase valuable engagement with your followers.

Below are a few Instagram stories to choose from, but with practice you’ll soon learn what works best for you and your brand.

• Simple colour background with added text.
• Add music to your image and you can even decide on the point you’d like your track to start.
• Going ‘live’ on Instagram stories has become a popular choice especially for events or launches of any kind.
• People love boomerangs, which is a setting that takes a burst of photos which loop to create a short animation.
• Superzoom allows you to create a funny or dramatic video clip.
• Stop-motion is a setting that allows you to create short animations.