By Evelyn Covarrubias
Photo Credit: TechCrunch.Com
Instagram took a page from Snapchat’s book and released a disappearing content feature: the Instagram Story. And in 2017, Instagram’s stories reached its one year anniversary and snatched Snapchat’s crown as the most used platform to share in-the-moment content. With Instagram Story taking over social media, it’s time for businesses to become acquainted with the benefits that go far beyond the augmented reality puppy dog face.
As we are very aware by now, we live in a social media world. It is vital for a business to have a good social media presence and connect with its followers. Yet finding an identity on social media is sometimes confusing for companies who are trying to keep up with the ever-changing social media landscape.
What is an Instagram Story?
An Instagram Story is a post that goes up on Instagram and lives for a 24-hour duration. Once the 24 hours are up, the content disappears from your feed. All stories can be seen in circles at the top of the Instagram app and appear when you tap on the icon with the user’s profile photo. The content can either be a photo, video or Boomerang but short video is definitely growing in popularity. Posting streaming content in Instagram Story has a feeling of utter spontaneity to it, but businesses can use stories in a planned, deliberate way.
How to Post:
Starting from your homepage on the Instagram app, click the camera in the top left corner or you can also swipe right and a camera appears. Once you take a photo or video you can press the ‘send to’ button at the bottom right and click ‘Your Story’ and your content appears on your followers’ feed. If you want to upload pre-loaded content from your camera roll, just swipe up and select an image or video from your files.
Photo Credit: Theverge.com
Glimpse into Office Culture–Keeping it Real and Fun
The magic of a story is that the content can be natural and bring followers into real-time, which provides a certain authenticity unlike a regular post in your feed. A story should be toned down in terms of formality and give a real-life glimpse of the happenings of a business without interfering with the carefully curated content of your page. Whether it be fun interactions with the team, a meeting at a cool offsite location, attending events or sharing a special occasion at the office, stories grab attention sometimes more effectively than a static photo in the regular Instagram feed.
You can tag your location on the Instagram Story and also tag any other accounts that are relevant to the photo or video.
Show Your Work
Showcasing the work of the business in an Instagram Story is something you know people want to see. However, if your work consists of excel sheets or coding that is not understandable to viewers, you may want to focus more on the personalities at the company when giving a BTS glimpse into the business.
Link to Website, Articles or Blog Posts
If your business has a blog or was featured in an article or you simply want to redirect followers to a website, insert a link and they can swipe up on the screen to view the designated site. However, this feature is ONLY available for verified pages. For those pages that are not verified, you can always insert a link to your company’s Instagram bio and write the text “link in bio” over the content.
Regardless, you should insert a preview of the designated link on the Instagram Story and if people want to read more about it they will follow your direction.
Live Stream an Event or Tutorial
Live streaming has been introduced to social media and people are finding creative ways to generate live content that will make followers want to tune in. To create a live video, simply swipe right from your IG home page to open the camera and click ‘Live’ at the bottom of the screen. There’s no need to create a Saturday Night Live-type production, but you can definitely be creative on how you produce the content. If you’re at an event, especially if it’s exclusive, take your followers as your plus-one and live stream the happenings at the event to give a peek into the festivities. You can find an expert or thought-leader in the business to do a tutorial on something that they can provide great insight on and that is of interest to followers. For example, if you produce video content for a living, you can host a live tutorial on video generating tips/tricks.
Interact
Something to keep in mind about Live feeds is that you can see who is tuned in at the bottom of the screen and viewers can comment on the feed to give you real-time feedback or greetings. This is a great way to interact with viewers, so feel free to ask them questions or ask them if they have any questions for you.
Schedule it
For the best results, you can schedule a specific time that you will be going live and let your followers know via prior IG story posts or a regular post that they should tune in at that time/date.
Have a purpose
Unless you’re the Dos Equis man, aka The Most Interesting Man in the World, don’t live stream randomly, but make sure there is a strategic purpose for why you are going live.
Instagram Story Takeover
Instagram story takeovers have been a huge trend this past year, especially with brands. Businesses can find influencers, experts or thought leaders to take over their IG stories and take them on a ‘day in the life’ tour, provide tutorials, try out their product and basically showcase anything that followers might find interesting as it pertains to the business and the person taking over.