You spend hours curating the content for your Instagram feed, wait anxiously to see if people like it. But are you also creating regular content for your Instagram Story? The 24 hour, exclusive stop for instant, behind the scenes content from your account can often be overlooked as a proper tool for content creation. Here are a few reasons why your Instagram Stories are just as important as your feed when it comes to growing your account.
Use your Instagram Stories as the back door to your brand
If your Instagram Feed is the shop window, make your Stories a behind the scenes tour of instant and exclusive content that will disappear after 24 hours. This should be where you put content that didn’t make the cut onto your feed, for example, a shot of you sat down reading that isn’t perfectly composed but is just raw and real. Use this as a chance to offer your personality, talk to the camera, form a relationship with your audience. Show them the person behind the feed and be genuine.
Generate engagement for your Feed through your Instagram Stories
In a lot of cases, your Instagram Stories may receive more impressions than your Feed posts. You can view your analytics by swiping up on your Stories. So if more people are seeing your Stories than your Feed, then you should be sending that audience to your new content. Share your latest Instagram posts in your Stories, share your newest blog posts or video uploads too. Use this platform to reach your audience in a different way. When you really want to get hold of someone maybe you both call and text them, so why not post to both your Feed and Story?
Engage your audience in a new way on your Instagram Stories
If you want to know why engagement on Instagram is so important, take a look at my post here.
There are several features unique to your Instagram Stories that you can’t apply to your feed. These include Poll Stickers, Question Boxes, Swipe Up Links and many more features. This really sets aside the content you can create on your Story and gives you an instant way to reach out to your audience and make them feel involved in your account. You can also get your followers to let you know their thoughts on your account and brand by asking them to interact using Polls and making suggestions in the Questions Box feature.
Utilise your Instagram Stories to generate link traffic and work with brands
One of the annoying features of Instagram is the lack of links you can use. You have the option to include one clickable link in your bio and none in your feed posts. However if you have over 10,000 followers on Instagram, you are able to send traffic to links using the Swipe Up feature on your story. If you create fun and engaging graphics that make users want to Swipe Up then you are generating new traffic to external links. This also gives you another option to reach out to brands with and create custom content for them to help generate sales when working in promotion with you.
Tag brands you want to work with, in relevant Instagram Story content
If you really want to work with a certain clothing brand and already own a lot of their stuff, tag them in a post in your story. This is quick and easy content that showcases your account, sends them a notification and approaches them in a different way to how an email would. This may also result in your content being shared into their stories which would offer you a higher reach.
I hope you’ve found these tips helpful, please drop any of your own down below in the comments! My friend Julia has an amazing and informative blog post about earning money on Instagram if you wanted to check that out too.
Without hyperlinks, and with no chance of ever getting to 10K followers, Instagram is just a bit of fun and no chance at all with getting traffic to my blog.
But the more you post and put effort into growth, the more your account will become a marketing tool for traffic to your blog. So it will work, but requires the time and effort in to get there.
Wow this is really helpful! U really did your research! I’m going to have to bookmark this post haha, loved it! 💛
This is extremely helpful! I never really use my Instagram stories, because I didn’t think it would actually help, but I will be using it a lot more now!