Instagram has 1 billion active users every month and more than the half use the social every day. 500 million people are a juicy audience for every business, this is why you should do your best to reach your audience, engage it and convert.
Instagram remains one of the best social media when it comes to organic reach, but the thing that work best is using Instagram stories.
In this article we give you 12 smart and useful tips to use this tool at best so that you can expand your audience and engagement.
#1 Create highlights to support your business or promote your products
We all know what stories are. They are content that you can share with your audience for a limited time of 24 hours. What not everyone knows, or better, not everyone is using, is the highlight.
You can save some of your instastories so that users will be able to see them every time they want.
All you have to do is to go on your profile, click on “new” and then select all the stories you want to save in your highlights.
If you have an e-commerce you could save stories about your products, special promotions, seasonal items, contests, etc.
#2 Use multiple content in your stories
Whenever you publish a new story remember to vary the content. It doesn’t have to be all about images nor all about videos.
Instagram gives you a wide pool of tools that you can use to create stories. You can create videos, boomerang, images and much more.
You can add emojis to your stories or gifs. You can even pin these elements to a particular time of a video, so that they can appear whenever you want and give the wow effect.
By mixing these elements and content types your users will never get tired of what you publish.
Winning the attention of users is harder then ever, remember that it’s your first and main goal.
#3 Give dimension to your text
The goal of your Instagram stories is to catch the attention of the users and to keep it till the end. You want to use them to educate your clients, inspire them and entertain them. If you want to do that, you will have to use more than a simple plain text. You should give your text dimension and doing that it’s easier than you think.
First, you write a sentence with a color, put it on the picture or videos. Then you create another version of the same sentence, with the same font but a different color and place it near the previous one.
And ta-da!
If you have a long sentence or if you want to give your text a very unique design, you can try with mixing different fonts and sizes for each word.
#4 Play with tools to engage with users
Want your users to be more active?
Instagram gives you a lot of interactive tools you can use to make your people get in contact and react to your stories.
First, you can collect questions of your clients. Second, you can create polls and questions to test products, sentiment about your brand, or simple preferences. This will help you understand them better or make them identify with your brand.
You can also use the gradient bar with different emojis.
Starting a new promotions soon? Why don’t you tell your users to get ready about it with the countdown tool?
You only have to set the date and hour, and that’s it. Your users will see it and will also be able to get notified when the promotion is live!
#5 Regram a post in your story
If you published a content but it didn’t go viral as you were hoping, you can regram that post into your stories.
Go to your post, click the icon for sharing and then select your story.
You can either share your post or do it by creating hype.
If you want to do the latter, you cover the picture with a gif so that user will get interested about your new post, just like in the example below.
#6 Mention influencers or other brand
Instastories are perfect if you want to partner up with influencers or other brands.
Creating stories and tagging these people will allow you to both establish partnership or put in place win-win strategies.
The same goes with hashtags.
You can use locations or hashtags to raise the views of your stories (if you get mentioned in the hashtag or locations stories) allowing new users to find you.
#7 Regram stories of users tagging you
User generated content are a key tool for every business. Even more for e-commerce owners. In fact, UGC are able to double the trust and loyalty towards your brand, other then promoting it for free.
If users talk about you and your products in a positive way you can both regram their post or story in your own stories.
You can even create an highlight about these stories called “Review” or “Our clients”.
#8 Play the right song and make them stay
Yes, it’s true. The majority of users will use Instagram stories with no sound. Yet, adding music, especially to videos, is always a good idea.
To do that you can either use the music menu of Instagram or you can film a video with your Spotify or Phone music on.
#9 Go live
Like direct on Facebook, using lives is a key tool for Instagram.
In fact, when you go live the social will notify your follower. Moreover, live videos will be shown before every other Instagram story.
Live videos are more interesting and engaging because they are more authentic.
People love to see this in the brands they follow. They want to see what happens behind the scenes, in your office, in the production site, etc.
Use lives not only to talk about product and promotions, but to show them your human side. This is how you can connect with them.
#10 Go Hands free
If you want to film a long video and if you don’t want to spend all the time pushing the button you can easily choose the Hands Free option.
No more aching arms when filming your videos.
#11 Insert links
If you have more than 10K followers you can access a further option. You can insert links inside of your instastories and select the swipe up option. In this way, users seeing your story will be able to go directly to your website, product page or YouTube channel according to the link you insert.
If you want to insert t
he swipe up option but you don’t have 10.000 follower you can promote your story via ads. In this way you will be able to access this feature.
#12 Don’t over-story
Since your goal is to make people watch your entire story you should never post more than 4/5 content per time.
In fact, when users see a lot of stories one after the other, they will just swipe quickly lowering your stats. But more important, never giving your content the right attention.
Take away
If you are using Instagram to promote your brand, you should invest more time and effort to do it right. In the end, you want to get the best out of your Instagram strategy, right?
If you will apply all our tips to your Instagram stories, you will be able to attract, engage and maybe convert users into clients. And even better, into returning and loyal customers.
Of course, having a strong Instagram strategy won’t be enough to make your clients happy to come back. You need quality product, fast delivery, traceability of products. All things that uDroppy can give you.
We source product for every business and every niche, growing our owned product catalog every day. We work with top notch logistic partners like DHL to ship your products into the hands of your clients fast, everywhere.
We can lower your costs and shipping times thanks to our virtual warehouse and bulk service.
We can even allow you to expand your audience and customer retention thanks to COD in strategic countries of Europe.
Last, but not least, we take you from dropshipping to brand with ease thanks to our white labeling service and e-com manager support.
Long story short, we are the business partner made for you.
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