Before we talk about anything else, let’s first address the elephant in the room. Instagram stories are infamous for disappearing within 24 hours, so why use them?
From the audience’s perspective, Instagram stories facilitate the discovery of new businesses, visit websites directly, participate in contests, and give instant feedback.
From the perspective of businesses, stories are a way to cut through the clutter to reach audiences effectively, and authentically. Through stories, your business can drive website traffic, generate leads, leverage real-time marketing and constantly stay on top of your audience’s minds.
By the way, you don’t have to lose your stories in 24 hours. With the ‘highlight’ feature you can handpick your stories and highlight them on your Instagram profile. Pretty cool right?
There is a lot that individuals and businesses can do using Instagram’s story features and in this guide, we are going to help you incorporate these features into your social media strategy. Additionally, we also tell you how you can measure the performance of your stories using Instagram Insights! Read along to find out how you can benefit from Instagram stories.
Instagram Stickers For Marketing
Once you are ready with the image or video you want to put up on your story, click the little ‘smiling paper’ on the top right corner to explore an ocean of features.
Instagram story features allow you to add text to your photos/videos, add your website link, create a poll, support businesses, get featured on Instagram maps, play a quiz and do so much more.
Let us look at these features one by one.
Business Stickers
The best part about stickers on stories is that they are fun as well as functional. You can use these stickers to give a shoutout to other businesses on Instagram.
Take the “Support Small Business” for example. This sticker helps users to promote small businesses by directly mentioning the name of the business as well as linking their website with zero advertising cost. With this feature, you can also give your followers a preview of the business’s Instagram profile as well as a description of the business.
When Instagram users use this sticker to promote their favourite Instagram store, it can help improve their visibility. A small firm that receives a lot of love from its customers would automatically find it simpler to attract new customers, investors, influencers, and partners.
Another great example is the “Product Sticker.” The Shopping on Instagram integration makes product stickers available. Business accounts that have this sales channel enabled can tag goods in their stories. Users may press to view the price, description, and name of the product, and then tap again to go directly to the product page to buy.
Location Stickers
Adding a location in your Instagram story through stickers will help you optimise your story so it can reach more people near your location. Many Instagram users are able to find local businesses because of the location feature in Instagram story stickers. While there is no clear data available to illustrate the volume of Instagram searches, there are several success stories about businesses being discovered by Instagram users, resulting in generating leads.
Additionally, you can stand out from the crowd if you add a location to your story or a post because of Instagram’s Map Feature. This helps users to discover posts and profiles of public accounts that have mentioned their location. This spells like REACH for businesses who don’t fail to use the location sticker on their story or post.
‘@’ Mention Sticker
The mention sticker is perhaps the best marketing tool that Instagram can be credited with. It is a free tool that individuals and brands can use alike to promote their favourite profiles. Mention profiles in your stories to alert another user that you’ve done so. When someone taps the sticker, they will be brought to the profile of the tagged account.
When you mention an account on your story, all your followers are able to see the account you have mentioned. Additionally, you can reshare a story that you have been tagged in for cross-collaboration. This can help you increase your brand presence and visibility.
Holiday Stickers
Instagram’s algorithm is intelligent and recognises festivals, occasions and holidays from all around the world. These stickers have facilitated cultural exchanges across the world. Accounts that use these stickers have the potential of engaging with audiences around the globe.
Take the Pride Month sticker for example. Instagram accounts that used the Pride Month sticker in their Instagram stories were able to not only communicate the fact that they stand for LGBTQ+ rights but also improve their reach. The best part about this is that you can see stories, of accounts that are public, that have used a sticker regardless if you follow the account or not.
Add Yours
This feature is the best way to start a trend on Instagram. By selecting the ‘add yours’ feature, you can start a thread by posting a video or an image on your story. All accounts that follow you will be able to see an option to participate and add their video or story to the sticker and this will be visible to your followers as well as theirs. This could continue till the point where an image or a video could go viral through the add your feature.
The add yours sticker features encourage users to participate in an ongoing trend and organically reach a massive audience.
Pro tip: Make sure your Instagram account is “public” so that even those accounts that do not follow you have a chance to look at your story.
Ask Questions, Polls, Or Play A Quiz Stickers
Using these three stickers on your stories is a smart and effective way to increase your engagement rate. This is because it prompts participation from your followers and is far from a unilateral mode of communication. When users participate with your story through these stickers, it notifies Instagram’s algorithm that your story is performing well, thus enhancing your reach through engagement.
The Ask Questions feature prompts your followers to ask you questions by typing their text in the space provided. Through this feature, your audience can get to know you better if you reply to their answers through your stories.
By Creating a Poll you give your audience two choices to choose from. In contrast to asking questions where your audience gets to know you better, by creating a poll you can get to know your audience’s preferences.
Playing a Quiz by asking a question to your audience through this feature and giving them multiple choices. You can add as many options as you like, however, there is only one correct answer.
Instagram Insights For Stories
All business accounts on Instagram can measure the performance of their stories with the help of the Instagram Insights tool. This can help you analyse your social media content marketing efforts and dive deeper into high-level analytics. You can view the insights for the past 7 days up to part 2 years. Here is a list of all the insight metrics that you can use for stories:
- Next, Back Stories
- Business Address Taps
- Profile Visits
- Link Clicks
- Impressions
- Forwards or Shares
- Reach
- Replies
- Saves
- Story Interactions
Sometimes these analytics can seem overwhelming and you can take the help of a social media marketing agency to help you decode these insights.
Analysing and leveraging analytics are crucial in improving your social media marketing strategy for Instagram. We suggest you perform it on a weekly basis if not daily to consistently improve your engagement and reach through Instagram stories.
We hope this article helped you discover something about the story feature on Instagram that you didn’t previously know. Bookmark this article and save it for your future reference.
All the best for creating epic stories on Instagram!
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