There are currently over 500 million people creating and watching Instagram Stories on their mobile devices every day. And one in three people has said they become more interested in brands and products after seeing stories about those brands that feature those products. In short, IG Stories boost your reach and engagement and, in some cases, influence purchasing behavior.
Instagram Stories help you connect and engage with your target audience in an authentic way to build relationships that increase customer loyalty.
In fact, the Instagram Story feature was built to help brands share quick photos and videos with their followers to highlight what makes them unique. Plus, Stories give your audience a small peek into what goes on behind the scenes — and followers love that. Whether you’re an ecommerce brand, a content creator, or a small business, your Instagram Story is a great medium for you to build brand awareness.
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An Instagram Story is an in-app feature that allows users to post photos or videos that automatically disappear within 24 hours. They appear in a vertical format and are fast, memorable, and fun by design.
When you post a Story, a colorful ring appears around your profile picture, telling your followers they can tap on your profile photo to see what you’ve just posted. Your profile picture with the colorful ring around it also gets added to the top row of your followers’ home screens—making it the first thing they see.
[source] When you post a story, a colorful circle appears around your profile picture, indicating it’s tappable, and your profile picture gets added to the top of your followers’ home screens.
When a follower taps on your profile picture, your Story opens up.IG stories are a perfect way for brands to experiment with different kinds of content because, unlike your permanent curated feed, Stories disappear in 24 hours. Small business owners use their stories to post everything, from unedited videos of their everyday lives to photos of their new products and short clips of them answering FAQs. Brands also use their Stories to show customer appreciation by re-sharing their followers’ stories and posts in their own Stories.
Now that you know what a Story is, it's time to get into how you can post your own. You can create and post a Story in three easy steps.
Step 1: Go to your home page and swipe left from any point on the screen to open the Instagram camera application. You can also get to the Instagram camera by tapping the “plus” button found at the top right-hand corner of your screen and then tapping “Story.
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Step 2: Within the camera application, you can choose to either create brand new content for your story by tapping the white circle at the bottom-middle portion of the screen, or upload photo or video content you’ve previously created by tapping the album icon on the lower-left portion of your screen. You’ll notice this interface is similar to Snapchat.
If you choose to upload an existing photo, take note that Instagram Story dimensions are 1080px by 1920px. If you choose to create new content on the spot, you can create different types of stories:
Step 3: Once you’ve created your story, you can add stickers, emojis, and filters to it, draw on it, add text to it, and more. You can even mention or tag people or engage your followers through polls, quizzes, and other fun features.
If you want to create Stories even faster, you can create your content ahead of time in bulk and schedule those stories with Buffer’s planning and scheduling application. Buffer's Story tools will show you what your story is going to look like when it's live and let you schedule it ahead of time.
Instagram Story Highlights are collections of Stories that you curate, and they’re located at the top of your profile in the form of tappable circles. They were introduced in 2017 as a way for users to keep their favorite or most relevant Stories around for more than 24 hours.
Story Highlights appear directly below your bio, so they are one of the first things your followers see when they go onto your profile. Brands have used their Highlights to present important information (e.g., restaurant menus, product lists, etc.) upfront. Highlights are also a great way to keep testimonials on your account. When you re-share customers’ Stories about how happy they are with your product, instead of letting those testimonials disappear, save them in a Highlight Bubble.
Alongside Highlights, Instagram also introduced the Story Archive. After your Story disappears from your profile, it is automatically stored in your Story Archive, which only you can access within your settings.
From the Archive, you can save your expired Stories to your device, rewatch them, or add them to a Story Highlight.
To create an Instagram Highlight, you need to:
Once you’re done, your Instagram Highlight will appear as a bubble on your profile. You can have as many Highlights as you like, and they will stay on your profile until you remove them. To edit or remove a Highlight, just tap and hold that Highlight on your profile.
Instagram Stories are so powerful because they build loyalty and increase engagement by humanizing your brand.
Your followers probably already love your brand—sharing true, relatable, or interesting stories through a series of Insta Stories will encourage them to keep coming back to your Instagram account and interacting with your content (which eventually leads to conversions).
Instagram has made it even easier for brands to harness the power of Stories and create engaging content. The next time you post a new story, considering using the following features:
Instagram Story Stickers are cartoons, gifs, or text you can place over your Stories to make them more engaging and interactive. You can use Stickers to add some text to your videos to tell a story or add a poll to a photo of your new products to ask your followers which ones they're most excited about.
There are different kinds of Instagram Story Stickers—Both Shelly Clouds and Awesome Maps are using the Poll Sticker to gauge their audience’s preferences.To add stickers to your story, take or upload a photo or video and then tap the Stickers button (a smiley face on the top right of the screen) to find customizable stickers for the weather, the current time, location, and more.
You can move Stickers by dragging them across your screen and resizing them by pinching or expanding them with two fingers.
Instagram has also launched new types of stickers—like the Shop Sticker and Captions Sticker—to make it easier for Instagrammers with professional and business accounts to increase accessibility and engage their Story viewers. Here are some of our favorite stickers for small business owners:
1. Add Yours Sticker
[source]
Instagram’s Add Yours Sticker was released in November 2021. It allows creators to make public threads to connect content with a similar theme. When more users add their Story to the sticker, it creates a content chain.
The main goal of the Add Yours Sticker is to encourage collaboration between users. It also helps brands become discovered: if you click the sticker in someone’s Story, Instagram will show you everyone who has contributed to a thread.
2. Stories Captions Sticker
[source]
Instagram introduced the Stories Captions Sticker to increase the accessibility of their platform.
You can add automated text captions to your stories by simply adding this sticker. It is currently only available in English-speaking countries, but Instagram plans to roll it out across different languages soon.
3. Shopping Sticker
[source]
If you have Instagram Shopping set up for your business account, you can use the Shopping Sticker to add clickable product icons to your Story.
4. Support Small Businesses Sticker
The Support Small Business Sticker allows personal, professional, and business accounts to tag small businesses in their Stories through a clickable icon that also shows a preview of the small business’s account.
5. Donation Sticker
[source] Parents together uses its Instagram Stories to encourage donations for their fundraising drive.The Donation Sticker is an interactive sticker accounts use to encourage donations to a specific cause. People who tap the Donation Sticker can donate within Instagram to the linked cause.
6. Quiz Sticker
The Quiz Sticker lets you add an interactive, multiple-choice-type question to your Stories so you can ask your followers fun questions and see which ones get the right answer.
7. Question Sticker
The Question Sticker has a blank that lets your followers answer a question you pose. It can help you gather some insights on what your customers love, what they're interested in, what they'd like to see, and more.
8. Poll Sticker
The Poll Sticker lets your followers choose between two options you can customize: yes or no, A or B, basketball or soccer, 😃or 😭.
9. Countdown Sticker
If you want a product launch or event at the forefront of your follower’s minds, include this sticker so they can quickly tap to get a reminder for the date.
Some other fun stickers you can use are:
On October 27, 2021, the Story Link Sticker officially replaced the swipe-up feature.
This sticker makes links highly visible, and they can be placed anywhere on your Story.
The switch from swipe up to a sticker was good news for content marketers and small business owners since it meant you no longer needed 10k followers to link to a website.
In a statement, Instagram shared their reasoning behind the change, saying:
“We made this decision based on feedback we heard from the community about how impactful it would be for creators and businesses of all sizes to benefit from link sharing to grow in the same way larger accounts do.”
How to add a Link Sticker to your story:
If your account is a professional or business account, you can access Instagram analytics. Your profile analytics and Stories analytics are different, but both contain important data that can help you create more of the content your followers love.
[source] These are Story analytics from a marketing coach, Elise Darma.You can access your IG stories analytics by tapping the “seen by” icon on the lower-left corner of your story post. From your analytics, you will see:
You can find out which pieces of content are the most engaging based on Instagram’s Story analytics. If you need more in-depth information, you can check out Buffer’s Story analytics dashboard.
Spontaneously creating Instagram Stories and sharing snippets of your life with your followers is a great way to build engagement and start learning about the feature, but to really grow with IG Stories, you need a solid strategy.
On average, social media campaigns on Instagram see about a 20% increase in reach when Stories are involved. Use the Instagram algorithm to your advantage by using Stories to drive interactions with your followers. Little changes, like frequency of posting, using in-app features, and posting at certain times of the day, will help your algorithmic ranking.
Our research says to post one to seven Stories per day, but Instagram says two Stories per day is ideal to foster growth on the app. So you might need to experiment to find out what works for your brand.
However, our research says keeping a high completion rate (over 70 percent) means posting anywhere between one and seven stories per day.
Completion rate is determined by calculating the number of times your Stories were watched from the first Story frame all the way to the last Story frame within the given 24-hour time period.
This means that if you post between one to seven stories, the chances are 70 percent of your audience will stick around until the end of your last post.
If you post longer stories, the drop-off isn’t too bad. You can still see completion rates above 50 percent for Stories that are made up of more than 20 photos and videos.
Consistency is key to social media, and the Instagram algorithm agrees. Given that stories only last for 24 hours, you want to maximize the reach of that content. Consider posting your Story content a few times in one day and sharing your photos and videos in bite-sized chunks. Another factor to consider is posting your Story content at the times when your followers are most active on the app.
The best time to post will vary for every account based on its audience and when they are most active. To give you an idea of where to start, we studied the average completion rate of stories across the day.
As you can see, story completion rates are highest between 4-6 am, 8-10 am, 12-2 pm, and 8-10 pm (Eastern Time). But keep in mind that your account has its own set of unique followers, so only you can gauge, based on analytics, when you should post your Stories to get the best results.
Use the in-app features and save yourself time, money, and energy when designing Stories. No need to use Photoshop or another expensive third-party software with a steep learning curve.
It's important to note that the Instagram algorithm won’t promote content from other apps. For example, in February 2021, Instagram shared they are de-prioritizing content that features a TikTok watermark. So if you cross-post a TikTok to IG Reels or Stories, it's going to get less visibility than something created natively in the Instagram app.
All the more reason to stick with in-app tools.
Instagram Live is a kind of Story that you film, as the name suggests, live. Your followers can passively watch your Live, interact with you in real time through chat, or request to join you so you can host the Live together.
Create Instagram Lives when you have a special announcement to make, want to host an event (e.g., a Q&A session or office hours), or want to connect with your audience on an even more personal level. When you start a Live session, your followers get notified, so more people watch and join your session.
Stories created for ad placements help small business owners drive awareness for their brand by sending traffic to a website or an in-app shop.
When we used Instagram Stories ads to promote our blog posts, we found they outperformed our Facebook feed ads. Our Instagram Stories ads cost just $0.
06 per click! (On Facebook, our feed ads usually cost around $0.30 – $0.60 per click.)
Story ad placements take up a user's full screen, which means you can eliminate competing distractions like notifications and in-feed content from other brands. Here are a few ads we’ve recently spotted on Instagram:
To save you time on content creation, make use of existing Stories saved in your Highlights. If you have an IG shop, you can use product links so users can purchase your products directly through the ad.
Check out our starter guide. It includes ad specs and tips for creating ad creatives. All you need to get started is a Facebook ads account!
Instagram Story templates are a convenient option if you want to create high quality and aesthetically pleasing Stories quickly. With a template, you essentially have a pre-made, ready to go graphic to upload onto Stories. It’s essentially a convenient hack to create professional looking Stories in minutes.
Once you upload your template onto Instagram, you can still overlay it with all of the native Instagram Story features.
With Buffer’s Stories Creator – a lightweight and free tool – can create your own Instagram Story template by uploading a picture from your camera roll, or you can use one of five customizable templates.
Check out our blog post about Instagram Story templates for more inspiration.
Stories have become an incredibly important part of brand awareness and should absolutely be included in your Instagram marketing strategy. At Buffer, we enable you to plan, preview, and schedule your Instagram Stories ahead of time, so you have everything ready to post with a single push notification.
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More than 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day.
And those Instagram users have a keen eye for new products and trends. 58% say they’ve become more interested in a product or brand after seeing it in Stories. And half say they’ve actually visited a website to buy a product or service after seeing it in Stories.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that 4 million businesses advertise on Stories every month.
In this post, you’ll learn everything you need to know about how to use Instagram Stories for business.
How to use Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories sizes
Instagram Stories tips and tricks
Get your free pack of 72 customizable Instagram Stories templates now. Save time and look professional while promoting your brand in style.
How to use Instagram StoriesInstagram Stories are vertical, full-screen photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. They appear at the top of the Instagram app, rather than in the news feed.
They incorporate interactive tools like stickers, polls, and Instagram Story filters to make your content really pop. Here’s how to get started with the format.
How to make Instagram StoriesOn the left of the screen, you can select a format to experiment with: Create, Boomerang, Layout, Multi-Capture, Level, or Hands-Free.
How to check your Instagram Story viewsIf your Insta Story is still live — meaning less than 24 hours have passed since you posted it, just tap the Your Story icon on the app main page to see a viewer count for your Story.
Tap the number in the bottom left to get a list of the people who make up those Instagram Story views.
After 24 hours, once your Instagram Story has disappeared, you can still access insights, including reach and impressions.
Reach is the number of unique accounts that viewed your Story. Impressions is the total number of times your Story was viewed.
Here’s how:
Source: Instagram
How to use Instagram Stories stickersTo add a sticker to your Instagram Story:
Source: Instagram
How to add a hashtag to your Instagram StoriesAdding a hashtag to your Insta Story makes it discoverable to a wider audience.
There are two ways to add a hashtag to your Story:
Either way, once you start typing, Instagram will suggest some popular hashtag ideas to get you going.
You can add up to 10 hashtags to your Stories. (In which case we recommend shrinking them down and hiding them behind stickers, gifs, or emojis — learn how to do that from our Instagram Story hacks post.)
Like hashtags, adding a location to your Instagram Story expands its potential reach beyond your follower list.
Places and businesses may have a location page. Users can find the location page under the Places tab when they search, or by tapping on the location in another user’s post. If your Story ends up there, you could end up with a lot more views.
And if you have a brick-and-mortar business, your location page is where your happy customers can showcase their experience with you, and potential customers can check you out. (In order to set up a location page for your business, you’ll need an Instagram business account.)
To use a location sticker on an Instagram Story:
60% of people watch Instagram Stories with the sound on. That means, of course, that 40% watch with the sound turned off. If you’re posting videos, captions are a great way to make your content more useful to that 40% of people.
Captions are also an important way to help make content more accessible.
Instagram will auto-create captions for your video Stories if you add the captions sticker.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)
If you use the Music sticker to add music to your story, you can caption your video with music lyrics.
Stories don’t have to disappear after 24 hours. Highlighting keeps them pinned to your profile until you choose to delete them. This is a great way to showcase your best, brand-defining content.
Each highlight can contain as many Stories as you like, and you can keep adding to them as you post new content.
How to create an Instagram Stories highlight:
Tap your profile icon at the bottom right, then tap the menu icon (three lines) in the top right. Tap Archive. Scroll back to the Story you want to highlight.Check out our full guide to Instagram Story highlights, including icons and covers.
Instagram Stories on ExploreThe Instagram Explore page is the collection of algorithm-selected photos and videos that appears when you click the magnifying glass icon. Getting on the Explore page usually means a boost in reach and engagement, because the algorithm is showing your content to fresh, interested eyes.
So how do you increase your Stories’ chance of getting featured there? Instagram says that the biggest ranking signals of what you’ll see in your Explore feed are:
Here’s some information about how to create content that’s most likely to appear on Instagram’s Explore page.
To create an Instagram Story poll:
Source: OfficeLadiesPod on Instagram
How to use Instagram Stories questionsLike polls, IG Stories questions offer a way to make your Stories interactive.
Instead of asking your followers what they think, the questions sticker allows your followers to ask you questions. Think of it as the Instagram equivalent of an Ask Me Anything.
To use Instagram Stories questions:
You’ll find the questions in your viewers list. Tap any question to share it and reply. The identity of the asker will not be revealed.
Source: Team Canada on Instagram
How to add links to Instagram StoriesIn order to add Swipe Up links to Instagram Stories, you need to either have 10,000 followers or have a verified account.
If that’s you, read on. If not, skip to the video at the bottom of this section for a simple hack to add links to Stories even without 10,000 followers.
How to add a Swipe-Up link on Instagram Stories:
Don’t have 10,000 followers or a verified account? Here’s a hack to add links to your Stories:
Of course, there’s one final way to add a link to IG Stories, and that’s to pay for it. Instagram Stories ads always include a link.
How to use Instagram Stories shoppingIf you haven’t already set your business up for Instagram Shopping, you’ll need to do that first. Check out our step-by-step guide to setting up Instagram Shopping for all the details.
Once you’ve got your account set up, just use the shopping sticker to make your Stories shoppable.
Source: Instagram
Instagram Stories sizesIf you’re designing or editing your Stories on desktop, or uploading a Stories ad to Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll need to keep these numbers from Facebook in mind:
Before we dive into this list of tips, here’s a quick video primer with some strategies to optimize your Instagram Stories:
Now let’s get into our specific Instagram Stories tips.
Shoot vertical and lo-fiIf you’re just getting started, there’s nothing wrong with repurposing existing creative assets for IG Stories. In fact, if you want to run Stories ads, Instagram will automatically optimize existing content for the Stories format.
But realistically, you’ll have better results if you plan and shoot your Stories content in vertical format right from the start. The good news is you don’t have to get fancy. In fact, Instagram found that Stories ads shot on mobile devices outperformed studio shot ads by 63%.
That’s because mobile-shot Stories from brands look more like the content regular users post. By blending in with what users expect to see, brands can create a more immersive and less intrusive experience.
For example, KLM’s Stories series Live With Locals uses low-production, mobile-shot videos in which local residents showcase cities KLM flies to.
Source: KLM on Instagram
Define your brand’s visual identityYes, we just said low production value is A-OK. That doesn’t mean you can forget the fundamentals of visual branding. For example, notice that the KLM Story above uses the airline’s signature colors of blue and white for the text. And, of course, there’s the flight attendant at the bottom of the screen encouraging you to swipe up.
Consistent visuals help nurture your relationship with your audience: they should recognize your style without having to check your username.
Using consistent colors, fonts, gifs, and Instagram Stories templates is a great start. A style guide is a good place to track all your design decisions so you can keep your brand’s tone unified and your team on the same page.
If you don’t have a design team and you feel a little unsure of where to start, there are plenty of Stories-focused design apps to help you get this right.
Images are shown for 5 seconds on Stories, and videos last up to 15. But how often have you actually looked at a still image in Stories for a full five seconds? I’m guessing approximately never. And that holds true for your followers, too.
Instagram’s parent company Facebook found that top-performing Stories ads have an average scene length of just 2.8 seconds. For videos, use quick cuts and keep things moving.
For still images, you can create motion that holds your viewer’s attention using stickers like animated GIFs or the new animated text sticker.
Maximize the first three secondsNow you can make your story text move ✨
Just tap the animate button when creating your story. pic.twitter.com/G7du8SiXrw
— Instagram (@instagram) February 8, 2021
The most effective Stories convey their key message in the first three seconds. That might sound fast, but count it out — it actually gives you plenty of time to get to the point.
Consistent, branded visuals with a clear unique selling proposition right upfront will give viewers reason to keep watching your Story or, even better, swipe up to learn more.
This ad from Matt & Nat conveys everything right from the start: the brand and brand promise are both clear, the offer is prominent, and there’s a simple call to action.
Source: MattandNat on Instagram
On that note…
Include a CTALike all good marketing creative, your Instagram Stories should include a clear call to action. What do you want viewers to do next?
Swipe up is a perfectly fine CTA, but it can be a good idea to make it even more clear. For example, the Matt and Nat ad above uses text overlay to specify “Swipe up to shop.”
When you run Instagram Stories ads, you can choose to replace Swipe Up with more specific text like Shop Now or Learn More.
Posting Stories regularly is a good way to keep your audience engaged, But having to interrupt your workflow throughout the day to create and post Stories can become pretty disruptive.
Fortunately, you can create and schedule your Stories in advance using the Hootsuite scheduler. You can then work your Stories into your social media posting schedule so they complement your other social posts and integrate effectively into any ongoing campaigns.
Here’s how it works:
Ready to start scheduling Instagram Stories and save time? Use Hootsuite to manage all your social networks (and schedule posts) from a single dashboard.
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Help Center
Instagram Features
Stories
You can only post someone else's post to your story if the author of the post has made their account public and allowed their posts to be reposted. Not everyone can share a post from the feed in their story.
To share someone's feed post to your story:
Instagram app for Android and iPhone
Click the icon below a photo or video in the feed.
Select Add Post to Your Story, Add Video to Your Story, or Add Reels Video to Story.
Press in the lower right corner of the screen.
Click Share.
Instagram Lite app for Android
If you share someone's post in your story, every person who has viewed it will be able to see the name of the author and go to his account. Learn more about how to share a store in an Instagram story.
If you have a public account, you can prevent other people from sharing your stories.
To prevent people from sharing your posts in Stories:
Instagram app for Android and iPhone
Tap the or icon on your profile photo in the bottom right corner of the screen to go to your profile.
Tap the icon in the upper right corner of the screen and select Settings & Privacy.
Click Privacy and select History.
Click next to Allow reposts in stories.
Instagram Lite app for Android
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Stories feature has been working for a long time, but some users can't add Stories to Instagram. A couple of years ago, Instagram had a little difficulty: the rating began to fall, and subscribers began to spend more time on another American network, Snapchat.
Then the developers came up with a new feature, and this innovation of stories in Instagram helped to return to the leading positions.
The new tool won users over with two advantages:
There are several ways to make stories on Instagram, which method is preferable, topics and add content.
When using the first method, the photo or video is downloaded directly from the application. To do this, go to the application, slide the screen to the right or tap the camera icon in the upper left corner.
The screen for adding a new story will appear there. Next, a picture is taken: by clicking on the white circle or by loading content from your own gallery. It is worth noting that in this method it is possible to use a flash, selfie mode or pick up a virtual mask.
When adding a video, remember that the duration of one story is only 15 seconds. If your video file is longer, the application will automatically split it into several parts, each of which is edited separately.
The second option to add stories from existing photos and videos. To use this method, go to the gallery, select the content of interest.
Once published, choose what to do with it: add to profile, save to gallery, download story or send to friends.
With this method, you can use additional functions, add stickers, images, widgets, texts and GIFs.
If you want to add a GIF or a sticker, click on the icon with the smiley. You can also specify a friend's name or geodata, conduct a survey.
However, the addition functions do not end there. The developers came up with the opportunity not only to place and publish the story, but also to supplement it with sound.
To add music to your Instagram story, click on the screen where the function for adding stickers is. There is a music pictogram here, with hundreds of music tracks.
Having found a song of interest, you can pre-listen to it and select the passage of interest. It is important that the music can be selected even before shooting the video, and the shooting can already be done with sound accompaniment.
This feature is not yet available in Russia.
By publishing such material, users will see not just another Stories, but it will also be sounded with music and a sticker with the name of the track and the artist.
You've probably seen green Instagram Stories, which are characterized by a round border in a different color. This "close friends" feature allows you to post content only to some users and create a list of friends to share hidden stories with.
Instagram Green Stories allow you to share the content you want by filtering out users who don't want to see some content.
Green Instagram stories are used to share personal photos and videos with small groups of followers.
Those who are included in the list of "close friends" can easily recognize them thanks to their distinctive features - a green circle and a special label.
But viewing a green story on Instagram does not give you access to the list of users who, like you, are included in the list of close friends.
To create and add subscribers to the list of close friends you need.
It happens that one post for a story about fun is not enough. Then you can add another story to Instagram.
How to add multiple Stories on Instagram is easy to figure out. To do this, you just need to go to the previous story and click on the camera icon in the upper left corner. Further, everything is much simpler, the procedure for adding another story is the same as for the first publication.
It is worth noting that this feature is very useful, because you can not only publish an excerpt from your life, but even post a mini-series. You can also add the series to IGTV Instagram.
Instagram has quickly burst into people's lives. Thanks to him, you can learn a lot from the everyday life of friends, and share your joyful moments.
