Engaging your audience and how many people you can get to take action when they see your posts should be the overall goal.
The story format is growing increasingly in popular across multiple platforms, especially on Instagram with a reported 300 million daily users. This blog will identify the best methods to help increase your story engagement.
Optimise
Stories are a great way to showcase spontaneous creativity to your audience, but this doesn’t mean that time and effort shouldn’t be put into optimising each post to increase exposure and engagement.
Whether it’s mentioning a user, utilising hashtags, or adding a location, all these elements will go a long way to helping build a community amongst your audience and make your account more likely to be found by prospective new audiences.
Tell a Story
It’s important that your business stands out amongst the masses of brand messaging, captivate your audience by showcasing a visual story.
Get creative with your ‘micro story’ through photos and videos, making sure that it’s coherent from beginning, middle, to end to make each post an experience for the viewer.
Stickers
Stickers will certainly bring the fun factor to your story updates, but it’s also an important tool to help encourage your followers to discuss, share their opinions and experiences, and more importantly create engagement.
Instagram are constantly improving their catalogue of stickers with a donation tool currently being tested, but there are certain sticker types that garner more engagement.
Question and poll stickers are a great way of prompting your audience to share their queries, preferences, or provide general feedback to help shape your content and your entire business plan going forward.
Screenshots
We are all guilty of screenshotting posts to save and share with people at a later date before it’s lost in the timeline, take advantage of this culture by creating your own quality ‘screenshotable’ content.
The interactive possibilities are endless with the ability to create fill in the blanks, wallpapers, and contests to encourage the use of user-generated content and to make your engagement beneficial and fun.
Schedule Your Stories
Like any platform, there will be peak times that your audience will be spending the most time on Instagram, you could be limiting your engagement by posting at the wrong time or infrequently updating your feed.
A lot of this will come down to being more entuned with your analytics, once you’ve identified the best time to post your stories you can begin to schedule your posts to ensure the maximum opportunity for engagement.
Links
Like any of your social media posts, you should always be linking back to your website to create increased multi-platform traffic.
Once only available to verified accounts, it’s easy for a business to now add a swipe up feature to stories with an appropriate link. Though simple, it’s certainly an essential method to see your engagement increase.