If you don't know what to post on Instagram stories, here are some ideas and tips to increase engagement and better promote your business.
In the last article we talked about Instagram Stories and how they are a fantastic tool for reaching your audience, building interactions and increasing sales.
Their importance is due to a whole range of benefits related to the basic concepts of brand positioning, authority e Thought Leadership, as well as the presence of a community.
Perhaps now the only thing you need is some tips on how to make your stories engaging to the right degree.
Here is the article for you!
I want to share with you some very simple and intuitive ideas for creating temporary content that can increase the engagement of your community and make it grow.
Read on and you will see how easy it is to know what to post on Instagram stories.Â
10 ways to use Instagram stories
Now that you understand how stories are an essential tool for growing your business, you may be wondering: how do I make them truly engaging?
That's right, because most brands often tend to focus on looking appealing and less on their ability to get people to interact.
Here are some simple ideas you can be inspired by.
#1 Promote a product, enter a countdown and propose exclusive offers
From the story, direct people to your website or to a purchase page, via a link or "scroll up" feature. Do you have something new in the works or about to launch a new product?
Allow your followers a sneak peek to get them excited and use a countdown sticker to increase anticipation. You can also offer limited-time discounts, deals and exclusive promotions.
Don't forget to include a specific Call To Action 😉
#2 Take surveys, quizzes and questions
Features such as polls and quizzes make interaction easy and fun and help you learn about the opinions of your audience (you know how critical this is). You can use them to do real market research or just to get to know your potential customers and have some fun.
#3 Preview more content
Share your latest post, blog article or YouTube video; provide details about the content and pique the curiosity of your followers to increase your organic traffic.
#4 Mention other business accounts that follow or collaborate with you
Instagram stories offer a great way for brands and influencers to collaborate and increase their visibility. Tag another account, share their content so they can do the same with you, run promotions so you can engage an even larger community and increase your brand's reach.
#5 Hold a contest
Contests are a great way to increase engagement: ask followers to comment on your story, tag you in one of theirs, or like your most recent post, raffling off a prize reserved for one lucky winner.
#6 Show behind the scenes
Approach your audience by showing them what's behind your brand: how you make your product, where you make it, what the creative process is, who the other members of your team are. Shoot behind-the-scenes footage or use this format to create hype around an upcoming product.
#7 Share your customers' messages and celebrate your successes
Show positive feedback from your customers in stories about how your product has changed their lives, share screenshots of posts in DM that gratify you or can be conversation starters with others, thank and tag those who have been following you for so long.
Post successful case studies, perhaps with "before and after" shots, showing the strengths of your brand and how people have benefited.
#8 Create tutorials
The sequential format of the stories makes them perfect for step-by-step content, such as an engaging alternative to traditional videos or "how to" style blog articles.
#9 Create featured Instagram stories
Save the best content, creating a kind of extension to your brand bio and a "show reel" that your followers can consult as often as they want. Indeed, featured stories retain all their winning features (speed of use, simplicity, sequentiality).
#10 Use stickers, hashtags and geotags
Instagram is all about community and bringing people together over shared interests. Increase the detectability of your stories by always tagging locations, and likewise, use hashtags, perhaps researching which ones are most used by your target audience and your competitors. Include stickers that are colorful and in line with your image.
Useful tips for your Instagram stories
As you can see, it takes very little to craft stories that can entice those who follow you to interact with you, bringing them closer to your product and increasing engagement.
To know what to post on Instagram stories, keep these tips in mind as well:
- Don't forget of identity and personality of your brand that emerges through stories; to make it more visible, use colors consistent with your brand and stick to a consistent theme for your content (funny, analytical, informative, etc.).
- Be authentic: leverage your personal story and share anecdotes related to your company: how you built the brand, what difficulties you faced, what values you follow, etc. This will not only help you gain more followers, but will show your existing audience that you are recognizable.
- Alternate content light and fun to more promotional or commercial ones. After all, people are also on Instagram to distract themselves from their daily commitments; making them smile is a good way to earn their attention.
- Remember that the community is what holds your entire business together; you can have the best product in the world, but without your fans you are going nowhere. They are an integral part of your business, you owe it to them to keep them in mind: try, as much as you can, to respond to the people who interact with your content.
- What you do on social media (and thus in Instagram stories) needs to be supported by a good strategy of Content Marketing: The content you offer in other channels must be useful and valuable to your audience, as well as relevant, original, and insightful. I recommend this post of mine Where I talk about the mistakes you should never make.
- Think out of the box: don't be afraid to give your imagination free rein; after all, this is ephemeral content, and if something turns out to be ineffective, you'll still be in time to adjust it. Be creative so you can figure out what works best with your audience and remember : as always, difference is key.
Conclusions
What I have shown you are just some of the things you can do through stories to increase your brand visibility and create engagement.
One last piece of advice I want to give you is to plan your shares to some extent: it is true that immediacy and spontaneity are one of the strengths of stories, but it is also true that everything you do makes sense from the perspective of a somewhat broader, multichannel editorial strategy, connected to other web marketing tools.
You can therefore partly calendarize them: for example, you can decide that each week you will publish a quote in the #MondayMotivation, you will share advice with the #Tuesdaytips Or will you try to engage followers in your #Giovequiz.
Good!
Now that you know how to use the Instagram Stories to engage your audience, you just have to get busy!
Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash