How to see countdown reminders on instagram
Instagram Stories Countdown Stickers 101
Today’s social media users are constantly bombarded with notifications. Whenever you discover a way to cut through the noise, we recommend jumping on it.
Countdown stickers for Instagram Stories are one of those ways. When used strategically, they put your business at the top of your audience’s notification page – real estate most brands would kill for. You can even take it one step further and use countdown stickers to directly drive sales for your small business!
Needless to say, there are countless ways that Instagram Stories can be used to keep followers engaged with your business. Whether it’s promoting an upcoming event or counting down to a new product launch, combining your countdown with other Instagram features like link stickers and other action buttons can drive signups, sales and more!
Here’s quick overview of what’s inside:
Contents
- 1 How to Create a Countdown Sticker for Instagram Story (with screenshots)
- 1.
1 How the Instagram Countdown Sticker Works
- 1.
- 2 What are the benefits of doing a countdown?
- 3 3 Ways to Use Countdown Stickers to Drive Conversions for Your Business
- 4 Conclusion
How to Create a Countdown Sticker for Instagram Story (with screenshots)
To create your first Instagram Countdown Sticker, follow these simple steps:
- Open your Instagram app on your iOs or Android device, click the “+” button in the upper right hand corner, then click on Story from the pop-up menu to create a new Story.
Alt text: how to create an Instagram Story
You can also use your finger or thumb to swipe right which will open the Instagram Story creator.
- Upload your media. Snap a quick pic or upload your own image or video from your camera roll using the button in the bottom left corner.
Alt text: how to create an Instagram Story
- Next, go up to the top right-hand corner and click the sticker icon.
You’ll see a wide range of stickers to choose from, including location, polls, links, and more. Scroll down until you see the Countdown Sticker.
Alt text: where to find the Instagram countdown sticker
- Once you’ve clicked the Countdown sticker, Instagram will prompt you to set your countdown name and countdown end date. To set a specific time, switch off the All Day toggle and set the time that your countdown will end.
Alt text: how to use Countdown on Instagram Story
Customize your new countdown using the color wheel at the top of the page to change your sticker color to fit your brand colors.
Alt text: how to set up an Instagram countdown
- Hit Done and the sticker should show up on your Instagram Story. Move your countdown clock around on your screen to make sure it’s not blocking any important elements on your image or video.
Alt text: setting up an Instagram countdown
*Note: An alternative way to add the countdown timer to your story is to open a new story from scratch, click on the Create option from the stacked menu on the left-hand side of the screen, and scroll through the options on the bottom bar until you see the Countdown option.
Alt text: how to create an Instagram Countdown using the Create feature
While this method gets the job done, keep in mind you will have to use the gradient backgrounds that Instagram provides and won’t be able to upload your own media.
That’s it! It’s that simple.
How the Instagram Countdown Sticker Works
Once you’ve created your Instagram countdown, anyone that comes across your story can interact with it.
Alt text: how to turn on reminders for Instagram countdowns
The countdown sticker functionality is great for a few reasons. When viewers click the arrow on the top right corner of the sticker, they can click Remind me to receive a reminder when the countdown ends.
They’ll also have the option to share the countdown to their story. Your job as a marketer is to make your countdown story engaging enough to make people turn on those reminders.
As a nice bonus, the sticker functionality also lets you see which Instagram followers turn on reminders for your countdown. This gives you insight into who’s interested in your event and which followers are most engaged with your brand. Keep these people in mind for the next section where we share how to turn countdown subscribers into new leads for your business.
Image source: Social Media Examiner
What are the benefits of doing a countdown?
Like all of Instagram’s interactive story elements, the countdown sticker is a tool you can use to increase engagement. When a follower engages with a story element like a countdown, it signals to the Instagram algorithm that they’re interested in seeing more from you. This increases your odds of showing up more frequently in both the Stories bar at the top of the screen and their Instagram feed.
Beyond getting more face time with your audience, interactive elements like countdowns are a smart way to identify new business leads. Let’s talk about sales for a second. As we mentioned above, you can see when a viewer or Insta follower turns on reminders for your countdown. This not only indicates that these people are interested in the product or service you’re selling, but that they’ve actually gone out of their way to get notified.
If Instagram is a key part of your sales cycle, brainstorm ways you can reach out to these leads and seal the deal. Whether it’s a special offer code, a free resource, or even just a conversation in the DMs, these are the people you want to be talking to.
3 Ways to Use Countdown Stickers to Drive Conversions for Your Business
The countdown sticker can be used for businesses in a wide variety of ways. The more creative, the better! Here are a few of our favorite ways that we’ve seen brands utilize countdowns in their social media marketing:
- Build Excitement for Product Drops
Got a new collection dropping for fall? If you’re a small business with limited inventory, create a sense of urgency by letting people know to grab their favorite limited-edition items before they’re gone.
Check out how Vitae Apparel incorporated the countdown sticker into their story series promoting their newest swim collection:
Alt text: How to use countdown stickers in your story
Products don’t always have to be physical. Countdowns are also a great way to promote the launch of digital products like courses, guides or ebooks.
If you’re using a countdown to promote your product, include sales elements like link stickers or shop tags that direct people where to buy. This not only makes your customers’ lives easier, but also increases the odds of your countdown leading to a sale.
- Promote Upcoming Events
If you have an upcoming event, Instagram Live Show or webinar, promote it with a countdown! Your followers lead busy lives, so a little nudge the day of the event is a great way to boost attendance and keep your event top of mind.
We love how fitness brand Bala used a countdown to promote their livestream panel for the followers who couldn’t make their event IRL:
Alt text: How to use countdown stickers in your story
To increase the likelihood of people registering, add the event registration link to your story and put it in your bio.
Include details about the location and venue as part of your story set so your audience knows what to expect!
- Time-Sensitive Contests or Sales
Things like contests and sales typically have a set deadline or lifespan. Create a sense of urgency of time constraints with a countdown sticker. Once your offer or sale goes live, add a countdown to when the event ends. This will let people know they only have a limited time to take advantage and participate.
This works especially well for digital products like courses. Set your countdown to end when registration closes and encourage followers to sign up before the deadline. Make sure to promote the urgency with other stories in your series explaining the details of the event and the value your audience will get by registering.
Social media manager and coach Laura (@bsquared.social) used this tactic to promote her upcoming Reels course:
Alt text: How to use countdown stickers in your story
Laura paired testimonials from past students with countdown and link stickers to motivate viewers to sign up before registration closed.
Sked Tip: Always share your countdown stories to a story highlight. This extends its lifespan past the usual 24 hours of a story post. As long as the countdown date hasn’t passed, your audience will be able to view it and participate.
Conclusion
While many of Instagram’s stickers are fun to use, the countdown sticker might just be one of the most valuable for businesses. It allows you to engage with your followers and even drive conversions and sales directly from Instagram.
Your countdown sticker is most effective when it gets seen, so do your best to get it out to as many people as possible. As we mentioned, when turning on notifications for the countdown, your audience can also share the countdown to their own stories. By encouraging your audience to share your countdown with their own followers, you can create more buzz and get even more eyes on your business.
Make sure your next countdown story is ready to go with Sked Social’s all-in-one Instagram tool!
Uploading your story assets ahead of time with Sked means all you have to do is add your countdown sticker and hit send.
Yes, it’s really that easy. Schedule Instagram posts alongside your stories to complete your social media marketing strategy. Include the right Instagram hashtags, and while you’re at it – post to your Facebook Page or Twitter account. Test it out for yourself with our free 7-day trial.
How to Use the Instagram Countdown Sticker for Your Business
Since Instagram came out with the interactive countdown sticker for Instagram Stories, it has become a lot easier for businesses to promote events, new content, new products, and to even drive sales. Find out how you can take advantage of the countdown sticker for your business.
The interactive countdown sticker on Instagram Stories is perfect if you want to draw attention to time-sensitive content such as a new product launch, an event, or a sale. Before Instagram introduced the countdown sticker, businesses did not really have an easy way to remind their followers about upcoming events. The countdown sticker has changed this, and there are many ways your business can take advantage of the feature.
How does the countdown sticker work on Instagram Stories?
With a countdown sticker in your Instagram story, your followers will not only be alerted to an event, they can also share it or choose to be reminded of it.
Essentially, when you include an interactive countdown sticker in your story and users tap on it, they get two options. They can either get countdown reminders, or they can share the countdown to their account. Users will find the reminders either as a push notification on their phones or in their Instagram notifications.
If a user chooses the reminder option from your countdown sticker, you will also get a notification about it in your activity feed or in your inbox, which can come in really handy for tracking interest rates and finding out what type of users are interested in your countdowns. Especially if you combine this with other features such as links to a website or shopping buttons, there is a lot of potential to generate traffic and increase sales for your business.
As with all interactive elements on Instagram, there are countless ways to use the countdown sticker in your stories to benefit your business. Here are just a few examples to show you how other companies are using the feature for their brands.
Countdown to new content uploads
Do you have a new podcast episode or blog post coming out soon? Are you planning on uploading a new video to your YouTube channel? Use the countdown sticker to announce new content!
Countdown stickers are a huge attention grabber and can direct more traffic to your web content. Marketing coach Amanda Robinson, for example, likes to use countdown stickers to promote new content before she launches it, such as her new book that will be coming out in 11 months.
Create anticipation for limited-time sales
A sale that ends in a few days is always a great motivation for consumers to check out the offer. Studies show that if customers know that an offer is only available for a certain period of time, they are more likely to make a purchase — out of fear of missing out on a good deal.
Countdown stickers create this very sense of urgency, so they can be a very effective tool for promoting a sale and ultimately, increasing revenue.
Make sure to include a swipe-up link or a shopping button in your story to make it easy for users to buy the products.
Launching a webinar or (online) course
If you want to host a webinar, a course, or even a retreat where the number of participants is restricted and users have to sign up in advance, the countdown sticker can be a clever way to get more people to register.
First, the flashy countdown sticker will draw more attention to your offer. Second, a countdown always implies that it is a limited offer, and the sense of urgency will encourage people to sign up faster. You could even encourage this by adding a reward for early birds, like offering a 25% discount to the first ten people that sign up.
As with sales, don’t forget to include a swipe-up option for people to register.
Promote events
Obviously, during the current pandemic, in-person events can be more difficult to organize since you have to make sure you follow health and safety regulations and limit the number of people at a venue.
If you are organizing a live event though, such as an outside concert, you can still take advantage of the countdown sticker to draw attention to the event and use the swipe-up button to lead users to a page where they can sign up for the event. In the past, the San Diego Chamber of Commerce has regularly hosted events that were also open to a limited number of outside visitors, and they used countdown stickers to promote these events.
Of course, you can also use the countdown sticker to promote an online event like the make-up brand Sephora is doing in their story about their upcoming beauty chat room.
You can even take a Facebook event and cross-post it on Instagram Stories, for example, by taking a screenshot of the event page on Facebook and sharing it as a story on Instagram. If you add the countdown sticker to your Instagram story, interested followers can then also get event reminders on Instagram.
Start a contest
Starting a contest through a countdown sticker is a great way to drive user engagement with your brand.
As a café, for example, you could have your followers share their favorite coffee stories and include a deadline via a countdown sticker. Whoever submits the best story by the deadline wins a free coffee at your store.
what it is and how to add it
Instagram's latest update has brought us a countdown timer that can be used in Stories.
This is a cool thing, because there is not only the date, time and name of the event, but also the ability to subscribe to some event and follow its start. Let's figure out how the countdown timer in Instagram Stories works and how to use it in your work.
Instagram guide: what it is and how to use it >>
What is a countdown timer and how to add it
To add a countdown timer, you need to go to Stories, select a picture or video for the background, and then go to the "Stickers" section, where you can select one of the widgets. From past experience, SMMs should be familiar with polls, questions, and other widgets that are also in this section.
The countdown timer is a new option and is a very recent addition. So if suddenly you don’t have a timer in this section yet, don’t worry, you just didn’t get into this wave of testing. After a short time, the timer will appear for absolutely all users who have updated Instagram.
After clicking on the “Countdown” icon, the timer itself will appear on the screen. You can enter a name for the timer, set an end date and time for the event, and choose whether to specify a specific time or the entire day.
To add a timer to Stories, go to the widget section and select "Countdown" there
How to set up a countdown timer in Instagram Stories other people to include reminders of your timer and share it in their Stories.
For most SMM projects, this slider should be left enabled (after all, the more people share publications, the better for the SMM manager), but for something personal, it might be worth turning it off. For example, if you're counting down the days until your vacation (and don't want some evil colleague to repost this to your boss).
You can also customize the colors for the timer by clicking on the palette at the top of the screen. There are both bright options, and quite restrained.
Only one countdown timer can be added to a story: if you try to add more than one, Instagram will warn you that it's not possible.
You can choose the background color of the countdown timer and also enter a name for it
How subscribers see the countdown timer
When subscribers open Stories with a timer, they will see a hint "Tap to get a reminder".
If they click on the timer, more detailed information about the date and time of the event appears at the bottom of the page, as well as two more buttons: remind about the event and share it in their Stories.
By selecting "Event Remind", followers allow Instagram to send notifications as the event's start date approaches. But choosing to share an event, they publish the timer on their own, with an active link (nickname) of the author of the timer or the page where it was posted.
Followers can add a reminder of your event or share your timer in their Stories post
Other features of
countdown timersAn important point: the author of Stories with a timer can find out which of the subscribers turned on notifications and who shared the timer in Stories. He receives notifications about all these actions.
You might be wondering what happens when the countdown timer reaches zero? If the entry is still hanging in Stories, then when it is opened, festive fireworks will appear.
All your countdown timers are saved. To view them, you need to go to the widgets and then click "Countdown Timer" and you will see all your timers. Thus, you can add the same timer to Stories several times.
You can view all your timers: both active and completed
Disadvantages of Instagram Stories countdown timers Storis), but not until she showed up.
It would be logical to report not only the time, but also the place of the event, but this is also impossible, and a lot of information simply does not fit in the name field.
So this is what they will definitely ask in a personal.
When you see the phrase about reminders, it seems that it will be possible to add the deadline date to your calendar - for example, Google or the built-in calendar on your phone - but this is also impossible. At the same time, for Instagram reminders, it is impossible to set a schedule and understand what time they will come at all.
How SMMs can use the countdown timer
It is clear that while this is a novelty, and people will actively react to the innovation, so it is worth testing the timers as soon as possible.
And here are some ideas on how you can use countdown timers in SMM:
- Event announcements. Timers are perfect for everything related to the event industry. Show how much time is left before your event and motivate people to come.
- Announcements of events and achievements. Remember the "I'll make a million in one year" stuff? Similar goals will now begin to appear in the format of timers for many bloggers.
In the same way, you can present the opening of a new store or branch of the network, the time before the start of a sale or the appearance of a new collection. - Deadline discounts. Good old "This discount is only valid until Monday!" - a technique that only the lazy did not use on their site. Now the same will happen on Instagram. The meaning is clear - if the terms of the promotion are limited, there is more motivation to buy something.
- Promo codes. And here the call to share the promotional code in your Stories will work perfectly - any promotional codes will be great distributed among the audience.
- Quick contests. By the same mechanics - place a timer with a contest in your Stories, and when the time runs out, one of the participants will receive a prize or a discount. The timer must be set for a day or less so that all Stories of the participants are visible. However, summing up the results of such a competition will have to be done manually.
To sum up
The countdown timer is a very interesting topic for SMM people, I think over time there will be more ideas on how to use it. And if inspiration has already visited you, suggest your options in the comments to this article!
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