How To: Make Your Brand’s Instagram Stories More Engaging
Make the most of Stories with these tips on how to create engaging brand content.
© Sandra Semburg via Vogue Paris
Engaging the audience you have is just as important as driving new follower growth. When it comes to Instagram Stories it can be easy to focus on metrics like views and completion rate, but generating meaningful interactions and responses to the content that your brand is sharing can be equally valuable.
In this post, we'll share some of the best practices for Instagram Stories and give you some inspiration for your next batch of content...
Post With Purpose
Storytelling has always been a key part of social media, and successfully leveraging features such as Instagram Stories can make all the difference to your followers and their brand experiences. Each Instagram Story you share should have a purpose and provide people with as much context as possible (in the most visually pleasing way). Striking the balance between images and copy will help to set the scene and drive your brand's narrative.
Utilise Instagram Stories Native Functionality
Interactivity is one of the best ways to boost engagement. It's up to you to choose which stickers are right for your brand but in our opinion Poll, Question and Location Stickers - as well as the Reaction Slider - are the tools that will add the most value to your content. Not only can they can help to improve performance and provide valuable insights, but hashtag, @mentions, and geotags will ensure that your Stories are instantly more discoverable, which means greater brand awareness.
Create a Weekly Series
It can be a little overwhelming curating daily content for your brand's Stories, but introducing a number of weekly series can certainly help. They will make it easier to plan your week as well as populate your Stories Highlights. Popular weekly features include new arrivals, UGC galleries, polls, links to blog content and multi-frame stories featuring topical product edits. Be sure to switch up graphics and keep things fresh though - your aim should be to keep your audience excited and engaged.
Be Consistent
Although you can afford to be more playful on Stories than you would in the main grid, it is still worth having a style guide in place. It's important that your followers instantly recognise your content - not only your images and products, but also your fonts, colours, layouts, filters and hashtags. Apps like Unfold and Stories Edit can help you to achieve a level of consistently but this is something that you can also choose to do natively, too.
Give Followers a Prompt
Don't be afraid to give your followers a little nudge every now and then. Adding prompts and calls to action to Stories will work to increase the amount of time people are spending on your content, and also retain viewership through multi-frame posts. Popular terms include 'hold down to read', 'swipe up for more', and 'tap through to discover'.
Words by Daniel Flay
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