Instagram Stories: The Complete Guide to Creating Engaging Content
Everything you should know about how to use Instagram Stories to increase your organic reach as well as engage and attract your followers.
Written by
Julia CohenJump to a section ✨
Why and how should you use Instagram Stories? Let’s get to the basics
What are Instagram Stories? 📖
Why should you use Instagram Stories? ⏯
- They can bring you closer to your followers, because you can directly respond to their questions, ask their opinions or more authentically jump on and speak to them.
- They only last 24 hours. You might not want to chronicle your every day on the feed, because it would be overload for your followers, right? Any content you don’t want to put on your feed, you can add to your Stories, and it doesn’t have to be as aesthetically high quality as what you might put on the main grid.
- Speaking of content, you can repurpose or reuse content that you create and don’t use on your feed, on your Stories, so they don’t go to waste.
- You can be more raw. Stories are less curated than the feed, so you have the opportunity to be more open with your followers and share more of your personality, using Stories.
- You can drive traffic to your website or business. If you reach 10k followers or run paid ads, you can also include Swipe Up links on your Stories, which means people can tap through to a link directly. In your Instagram captions, you can’t actually share links, so this is a huge plus.
- You can understand what your followers want to see. With features like question stickers and polls, you can collect information from your followers on the content they like to see, as well as their interests.
How do you add an Instagram Story? 📸
What size are Instagram Stories? 📏
How to add drawings and text to your Stories 🖼
How to add music to Instagram Stories 🎸
How to add stickers, polls, gifs and more to Instagram Stories 🙌
What stickers can you add to your Stories? 💋
- Location tags – you can geotag your location, to show your followers where you’re visiting, whether its a cute food spot or a great concert.
- Mentions – even though you can tag people in Stories using text, you can also use stickers to mention other users.
- Hashtags – again, although you can use hashtags using text, you can use the Hashtag sticker (for a maximum of one hashtag) to make it stand out a little more. This is great if you’re using something branded, or you’re at an event.
- Questions – you can use the question sticker to ask your followers a question or have them submit their questions for you!
- Gifs – by clicking gifs, you can search giphy for cute gifs you might want to add to your content to help contextualize it.
- Music – you can add music to Stories using a sticker.
- Emoji sliders – you can use this to let your followers tell you how much they love something, or use it in a poll! You can also pick the emoji you want to use.
- Reshare – this is a new one and is only available to some users. It’s a way that you can reshare your own, or other people’s feed posts on your Story.
- Poll – this is a ‘yes or no’ poll that you can use to ask your followers to vote and share their opinions.
- Quiz – Select up to four options, and use this to create quizzes on your Stories for your followers to play.
- Links – if you don’t have 10k followers, you can still share links by using the ‘link’ sticker on Stories.
- Donations – you can highlight and ask your followers to donate to a specific cause or fundraiser with this one!
- Countdowns – put in a specific date and let your followers turn on notifications for the countdown.
How to use filters on Instagram Stories 👋
How to add multiple pictures to an Instagram Story ☝️
How to add Stories to Instagram Highlights ✨
How to change your background color on Stories 🌈
How to create engaging Instagram Story content 👍
Best practices for engaging content ✅
Creative and fun ideas for creating Instagram Stories 🎨
How many hashtags should you use on Instagram Stories? #️⃣
How to analyze Instagram Stories 📈
Want to monetize your Instagram Stories? 💸
How to schedule your Instagram Stories
How to schedule Instagram Stories with Meta Business Suite
- Go to Meta’s Business Suite
- On the left side, select “Content”
- At the top of the screen, click the arrow next to “Create Post” and then select “Create story”
- A pop-up will appear where you can select where you would like your Story to publish
- From here, select if you would like your Story to publish on Instagram, Facebook, or both
- Upload your content, add any stickers or links
- Once you have everything uploaded and how you want, select “Active times” to see the best times to post your content. Or, you can choose your own time and date and click “Schedule”
- And that’s it!
How to schedule Instagram Stories with Flick
- Log in to your Flick account
- Click on “Scheduling” on the left side of the screen
- To upload your Story, click on “New Post” at the top
- Select Instagram only and click “Story”
- Upload your content or select content from your media library
- Select the date and time you want the Story to post
- Click “Schedule” and that’s it!
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