How to Use Instagram Stories in the Most Effective Ways

After Instagram launched its Stories feature it has widely been used. Since the stories are more visible and appear on the top of anyone’s feed, they give a better chance for your followers to see what you are posting. 

Instagram story is a feature where you can post and share updates for a short period of time. Unlike posts that stay on your account once you post them, stories appear for only 24 hours. 

While on posts you can only see who has liked or commented on your pictures and not who all have viewed them, stories offer this feature as well. While you share an Instagram story you can see who all have viewed your story. 

Recently, Instagram has also added the feature of liking a story which means that with viewing an Instagram story users can even like them as they do on the posts. 

Let us see how you can use Instagram stories in the most effective ways to gain followers and increase your growth on the platform. 

Post Time Limited Offers

If you are a business and trying to grow on Instagram this is one of the best ways to achieve your objective. 

Post time-limited offers on your stories. There are a few people who might see your content but do not follow you. Posting important things on your story would compel them to follow you for fresh and exciting offers. 

While offers already increase your chance of gaining profit, posting them on stories would increase your chance of gaining more followers as well. 

You can also share important updates on stories that you do not post. As posts remain on your account always, Instagram stories disappear in a day which gives you an opportunity to post updates that your followers might want to see and increase engagement. 

Share User-created Content

User-generated content is something that is shared or posted by users on the platform. An advantage of this is you don’t have to come up with an idea if you want to post a story every time.

You can share your stories anything you like, which is posted by someone else on the platform, not without giving them the credit of course. 

Many influencers also post content created by other users specifically for them. For instance, there are many fans or fan pages of celebrities and Instagram that post content that is dedicated to them. 

Some of the fans even post sketches of their favorite influencers. The influencers often share these posts on their stories to appreciate and show gratefulness towards their fans. 

Apart from these, you can also share memes or any humorous content on your stories to keep your followers engaged and interested while you do not have to create content every now and then to put up on stories. 

Leverage Tools and Features

Instagram has loads of tools and features, may it be filters, new effects, or stickers. Specifically for stories, Instagram has added a lot of features and tools that are definitely advantageous. 

New effects and filters always help you post anything that looks visually appealing while using different stickers also adds an advantage to your story.

There are also numerous featured stickers like polls and questions, that always help you keep your audience engaged. You can even use these features to interact with your followers and know if they like your content, or if they wish to see anything new. 

Instagram also has a feature of highlights where you can save your stories as highlights. Once you add your stories into the highlight section they remain on your profile and do not disappear after 24 hours. 

If you feel any content you posted on your story has shown a lot of engagement but you do not want to post it, you can add them to the highlights. 

Make good use of all the tools and features that keep coming up. Leveraging all these features would definitely help you or your brand effectively grow and increase reach and engagement on the social media platform.

Keep an Eye on Insights

For business accounts, Instagram shows insights of engagement on their posts. While people often tend to check them they overlook it in the case of the stories. 

However, keeping an eye on the insights for stories is very important. This gives you direct insight into the number of views and engagement on your stories. 

These insights are also helpful for you to choose which stories to save to highlights and which are not. 

Stories also show the number of views, if you get very less views on your stories as compared to your followers, you must know that you are not being able to keep your users engaged. Post content that keeps your followers interested always. In case the insights are not positive, you can always opt for buying likes on Instagram for an initial boost.

Add Links

Since Instagram bio is the only place where you can share a clickable it becomes a bit difficult to connect your target market directly to your site or store. 

However, the story feature gives you an option of adding a swipe-up link which you should completely take advantage of. If you are a business or a brand you can share an image of a product on your story with its link.

This helps you gain more customers for your business as they can easily see your best products on your stories themselves without having to find them as well as increases your growth on Instagram as well. 

Conclusion

Stories have a lot of features and you can make them effective in many different ways. Adding stories to your benefit is something you must do for your growth on Instagram.  

You just have to focus on planning the content you would be posting on the stories and make it as effective as you can. 

This is one of the best ways in which you can increase your reach on the platform as well as directly interact with your audience and listen to what they want as well as share updates about you.