5 Reasons To Use Stories
When we talk about stories in this article, we aren’t talking about telling your brand story, although that’s important too! Instead, we’re talking about Instagram stories.
Stories are a type of Instagram posts that only lasts 24 hours (unless you save them as highlights). Generally, because they’re short lived, they tend to be more informal than regular Instagram posts. Word is that many Instagram users scroll through their story feeds just as much if not more than their regular photo feeds. And there’s loads of advantages to using them. Here’s a few:
You can add working links
One thing that many businesses on Instagram find hard is that website links aren’t clickable in the captions. So if you’re posting about a new product listing or blog post, you either have to change the link on your profile page to that specific one, or you have to leave as your website home page and hope followers can navigate their way to the specific thing you’re talking about. But now theres another way! Add the link to your Instagram story instead.
You can easily share other account’s posts
A lot of accounts on Instagram use some kind of repost app to share other relevant posts to their feeds. For example, if someone posts about using your product or service, you may want to highlight that to your own followers. Or perhaps you’re a shop that stocks work from local artists, or a hospitality business that wants to feature things to do nearby. There’s lots of reasons you might want to share something posted by another business, but generally using and outside repost app can result in less engagement. Instead, you can share these posts to your story in an Instagram-approved way.
They’re great for engagement
Instagram stories have some really cool ‘sticker’ options. Tap the button that looks like a square smiley face and see what comes up — you can ask questions, take polls, host quizzes, do a countdown timer (great if you have an event or launch coming up), invite photo sharing and more. This is a fantastic way to build a dialogue with your audience and interact with them.
You can have a lot of fun!
Since stories are informal, you can share things that you might not want to add to your feed, perhaps because they don’t really relate to your business or don’t fit your brand aesthetics. For example, the local cafe you went to for a coffee, the daily walk with the dog, the slight mishap where you made a mess in your studio… Be creative, authentic and have fun. Don’t forget you can also add stickers, gifs and emojis to these sorts of posts using the sticker button mentioned earlier.
You can save the best as highlights
Sometimes you don’t want a story to disappear after 24 hours. Maybe you’ve even created it especially to save as a highlight. Highlights are the circles that appear below many businesses profiles and are basically saved stories. They often feature branded highlight ‘covers’, which you can add when creating the highlight. They are a great tool for making your profile page look really good and professional, bringing out your brand colours and style, and making it easy for your audience to see what you do as a glance. For example, you might have a highlight for each of the different types or products you sell or services you offer. They might rarely be viewed, but the titles underneath make sure that anyone looking at your profile will instantly be able to see the scope of your business.
Those are our five main reasons to use Instagram stories, but just recently one more has been added to the list — TikTok have launched a story feature too. For one thing, this is a clear sign that stories are where it’s at, but also means that the same photo or video can now be used on both platforms. For the rest, we’ll have to see how TikTok’s story feature performs — one things for sure, nothing stays completely the same in digital marketing!