Instagram Stories
AKIN member Annabel Cary, provides social media services and training for business. She also helps businesses adjust to the new kid on the Instagram block – Instagram Stories.
Instagram used to be about that single perfect image – the cappuccino in dappled light, on a table in Paris. The arrival of Instagram Stories in the summer of 2017 has turned attention away from the ‘Grid’, as the main Instagram feed is known.
Originally seen as a thinly veiled copy of Snapchat, Stories has surpassed expectations and now has double the users of its rival (with 400m daily users vs Snapchat’s 119m). If you use social media for business, Stories is a brilliant tool for on-the-go and informal behind-the-scenes content.
An Instagram Story is either a 15-second video, photo or ‘boomerang’. Each Story only lasts for 24 hours (unless you put it into Highlights). Many use Stories to upload longer videos, speaking directly to the camera. This sense of intimacy creates a sense of trust between business and viewer. From a marketing point of view, this ‘getting to know’ a business in such a genuine may is much more likely to translate into sales than a hard sell.
If you upload a Story, it will appear at the top of your followers’ Instagram feeds, so your content is much more likely to be seen than the images in your Grid. A rather depressing statistic is that 70% of Grid posts don’t even get seen!
If you use a good range of hashtags within stories, other users can find you without already following you. Top Tip: make the hashtag text tiny and hide it behind a sticker or Gif in your Story post.
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