10 Instagram Story Tips and Tricks for Engagement
IG Stories Is Where It’s At! 🔥
Looking for fast, fun, and easy ways to boost engagement on Instagram? Look no further than the top of your feed—Instagram stories.
Instagram is rolling out new features left and right, with many of them specifically for Instagram stories. So, there’s no shortage of ways to get creative while staying brand-focused and boosting engagement. We’re dishing out 10 Instagram story tips and tricks that will take your engagement from 0-100 in just a few taps. ⬇️
10 Instagram Story Tips and Tricks for Engagement
Maintain Brand Consistency
You’re not limited to the colors Instagram stories provide as far as text and brush colors go! With the dropper tool, you can easily adapt text and brush colors to be your exact brand colors.
Grab screenshots of your brand colors, individually or together, on one image, and insert the image on the story slide you’re creating. Then, use the dropper tool to hover over one of your brand colors and instantly add it to your slide!
Add Background to Post Re-Shares
When you share a post of your own or another creator’s to your Instagram stories, the default background is typically a variation of the colors found on the post you’re sharing. Unfortunately, those colors aren’t always consistent with your brand. Luckily, this is a quick fix!
If you want the background to be a solid brand color or even a brand-consistent image—here’s what you’ll do:
Share the post to your Instagram stories
Select the image you’d like to use as the background from your photos
Resize the chosen image to fill the story post frame
Press down on the chosen image and move your finger up or down to adjust the layering of the added image
Create Custom Stickers
Sticking with the theme of brand consistency, you can now create custom stickers in Instagram stories! Just about any picture with a clear subject can be automatically cut into a custom sticker, or you can manually cut a sticker out of an image.
Utilize Instagram’s Sticker Options
Specifically, utilize Instagram's new “notify” sticker and the link sticker!
By adding the notify sticker to your posts, your audience can tap it and opt-in for reminders about your content. Ideally, if they opt in, they’ll come back and interact with more of your content later.
The link sticker is perfect for sharing links to your website, resources, blogs, and other outbound links.
E-Commerce Babes: Here are more links to add to stories!
If you’re an e-commerce business with products and services to sell, there are two more stickers on Instagram stories that you’ll want to use: The product sticker and the “get orders” sticker.
You can use the product sticker to link your available product through the Instagram shop directly. “Get orders” allows your audience to view product details and send you an order request right from their feed. These links will not only boost your engagement, but they’ll help boost your sales!
Utilize All Engaging Elements
The engaging elements available on Instagram stories go far beyond clickable links. In fact, way before there were link stickers, there were the OG elements: Polls, question boxes, quizzes, and sliding bars.
These elements are great for engagement, but they are also some of the most informative tools on Instagram. By asking your audience about their preferences, wants, and needs using these elements, you can utilize the results to inform your content marketing strategy.
Create Instagram story sets that feature one of these different kinds of elements on the slides to keep each frame fresh but still super engaging.
Want to learn how to add a poll to your captions? Say Less.
Add Locations, Hashtags, and Mentions to Stories…
…and then hide them! All of these elements will help the discoverability and reach of your content, but you can be a little less overt in stories than you’d be on a static post.
Once you’ve added your desired locations, hashtags, and mentions to your Instagram story frame, shrink the text and drag it off of the frame. No one will see them, but their powers will still be in full force!
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Host A Story Giveaway
Want to get creative about hosting a giveaway? Skip the static feed post and take the contest to your stories! Instead of having entrants tag friends in the comments of a post, have them reshare your story and tag you for an entry!
By sharing the giveaway on Instagram stories, you can easily and continuously promote and re-share the giveaway parameters without taking up various spots in the static grid.
Use Stories As A News Hub
Keeping your audience updated on your industry’s latest is part of what makes you a leader in the space. But you don’t have to take up valuable grid space with weekly, even daily updates—you can post them to your Instagram stories!
If people want to click through, great! If they don’t, sharing this content to stories is less likely to hurt your content strategy overall. Plus, you can…
Save Stories to Highlights
The content you’ve shared to stories might go away after 24 hours, but you can save it forever by adding it to a highlight on your profile!
Highlights are the perfect place to store valuable information your audience might want to reference at a later date. They’re one of our favorite Instagram story tips and tricks! A lack of story highlights is one of the biggest mistakes we see from brands. Your perspective new followers should be able to tell exactly who you are, what you do, and how you’ll serve them when they land on your profile, and highlights help to accomplish that.
Pro tip: It’s not the Dark Ages—you no longer have to post images to your stories to save them as highlight covers. You can upload branded highlight covers even after the highlight has been created.
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WRITTEN BY:
Angela LaRose
Founder + Social Media Strategist
