4 Reasons Your Business Needs Instagram Stories

 

Open Instagram and what do you see? Those shiny little circles at the top, telling you there’s a new story waiting for you. If you’re personally all about the scroll, that’s A-OK, but you should know that lots of people are over the scroll. Instead, they spend a lot of time in stories—and you should too, if you know what’s good for your business. 

 

To find out how much of your audience is on stories vs. in your feed, we suggest manually checking your post and story impressions to get a pulse. To view your story impressions, open a current or recent story—one you’ve posted in the last two days, since Instagram only keeps the data for 48 hours. Open the post and swipe up for an overview of the accounts you’ve reached and number of interactions. 

 

 

To see stats on your in-feed posts, make sure your Instagram profile is set up as a professional account (Edit Profile > Switch to Professional Account). Once your professional account is all set, go to any post on your feed and tap “View Insights” to see that post’s reach and interactions. The bottom line: If you want to reach more of your audience faster and more consistently, stories are essential. 

 

 

Story-making doesn’t get much easier than sharing your own in-feed posts. This is an easy win for anyone who posts consistently to their feed and feels at a loss for story content. Share new in-feed posts to stories so that people are more likely to see them, then invite followers to save the post for later by visiting your feed. You could even re-share old in-feed posts to stories. People love a throwback, and your feed is a gold mine of story content ripe for the sharing. 

 

Teaser Tip: Add a “New Post” sticker to the in-feed posts you share to your story, covering up part of the image to make it more of a teaser. This way, followers will have to tap through to your feed to get the full picture. 

 

While in-feed posts are often planned well in advance (if yours aren’t, have you met our Evergreens?) stories are much more fluid and in-the-moment. Stories are a great way to let loose, be candid, and keep it real. In doing so, followers get to see your personality, how that plays into your brand’s personality, and they may even glimpse the inner workings of your business. All of this authenticity results in a huge boost in trust. 

 

How well do you know your social audience? Stories offer so many fun, engaging ways to learn about your followers—AKA your current and prospective clients. The more you know about them, the more you can cater messaging to those people, or discover that you need to pivot to better-reach your target audience. Use Instagram’s stickers (Ex: Question, Poll, Quiz, Add Yours, etc.) to glean some insight into your audience. You can keep it light and fun, or reflect on genuine questions you’d like some answers to, and ask away!

 

The Instagram algorithm can be a bit of an ever-evolving mystery, but it seems clear that the algorithm rewards you when someone interacts with your content. That is, if someone likes, comments, shares, or saves your in-feed post or story, the algorithm will keep showing them more content from you. 

 

Engagement Tip: To reap the rewards of engagement, keep it light. A simple story poll pitting chocolate vs. vanilla, summer vs. fall (you name it!) is a no-brainer for people to participate in. And each participant will then be served more of your content in the future. How marvelously sneaky is that?