Why you need to include Instagram Stories into your social media strategy

Basics

So let’s start with a short definition of Instagram stories. They are pictures or videos of maximum 15 seconds long that you can put up on your Instagram profile and they can then be seen for the next 24 hours by your followers. If your profile is not private they can even be seen by people that are not following you but are interested in your profile. We could call them stalkers but they could also be people to whom your profile came up on their explore feed and sparked interest to see your story. Instagram algorithm places pictures and Instagram stories to your explore feed based on your preferences and activity on Instagram. For your followers, these Insta stories used to only appear at the top of their news feed. But now, with the recent Instagram innovations, they also appear while you scroll through your feed. This new positioning helps promote them to your followers even more. You can add lots of elements to your Instagram story to make it more entertaining and engaging, like locations, current temperature or time, polls and a wide variety of emojis and effects. You can also use Instagram’s famous Boomerang app to make them even more creative.

Building a relationship

So now that you know Instagram stories basics, let’s talk about how you can use them to build a stronger relationship with your followers. Stories are an amazing tool in raising engagement on your profile because you are talking to the people who are already following you which means they really love your brand and are interested in what you have to say. Through Instagram stories you can promote different happenings that are relevant to your brand at any given moment: like sales, giveaways, offers etc. They are amazing for this kind of promotion because in this way you don’t need to constantly bombard your followers with content in the main feed but they will still stay informed about current happenings connected to your brand.

InstaPolls

Especially great tool for brands on Instagram is InstaPolls. What used to be hard and long-hours work, physically conducting the poll o the certain topic, gathering all the answers and finally analyzing them, now you can do a few short swipes on Instagram. Insta polls is an amazing way for directly communicating with your followers and finding out in which direction they want to see your content head to. With polls you can almost instantly get answers from your audience on questions that you are most interested to know.

You can:

• ask them to pick their favorite between different products of your brand
• offer them to choose what kind of content do they want to see more ( example: more lifestyle photos or more photos of products alone)
• create fun games like quizzes and run contests
• take them ”behind the scenes” of your brand

Create content with your followers.

These are all amazing ways with which you can easily collect useful data on your follower’s behaviour and preferences. All this information used to be much harder to get your hands on as a brand. By including your followers into process of creating content for your brand, whether you are a corporation or a blogger, you are not only creating a strong bond with your audience but you are also letting them know that you care about their opinion which is the whole point of social media marketing and creating community on social media as a brand.

Recap

So now that you know the importance of Instagram stories in building your brand on Instagram, start with planning and creating fun, informative and engaging content for your followers. Post frequently and make sure to use this interaction with your fans in the best way possible. It is important that you don’t go overboard and post too much or useless content because that could cause opposite effect and result in a lot of unfollowing. Remember, quality should always be a priority over quantity when creating your content.

Plan your content.