Instagram stories are one of the leading forms of video content for 2023 that can be used to promote your business and connect with both an existing and new audience. But, of course, it’s not enough to just make stories if nobody is actually watching them. So how can you stand out among the sea of pink-rimmed circles to actually get views on your Instagram stories this year? Read on to receive the best tips on how to build an audience for your Instagram stories in 2023.
What Are Instagram Stories?
Instagram stories are a type of post users can create and view on Instagram. Unlike standard posts, Instagram stories are only available for 24 hours. Rather than being posted to the feed and appearing in users’ profiles, Instagram stories temporarily appear at the top of users’ feeds. When a user has posted a story that you haven’t seen yet, it will be denoted by a pink-orange gradient border around their profile photo.
In this way, stories are essentially a separate part of Instagram that can be used in a different way and or for different purposes than standard Instagram posts and other features such as reels.
Benefits of Marketing With Instagram Stories
You’re probably already familiar with the benefits of using Instagram as a marketing tool, but Instagram stories also come with their own worthwhile advantages.
- Improved brand visibility – Because stories are temporary, you can post a lot of them in a single day without tiring out your audience. This allows you to have higher visibility, putting your business in front of your audience’s eyes even more times a day than you’d be able to with feed posts alone.
- Engage with and learn about your audience – Stories are a highly engaging form of content that can lead to a lot of interaction. Using them gives a great opportunity to build stronger connections with your customers and even learn valuable insights from them that can be used to improve a variety of things from your product development to your customer service.
- Get leads – Stories are one more opportunity to promote your products, link to your website, and otherwise find new potential customers to contribute to your sales.
Tips for Getting People to Watch Your Instagram Stories
The one downfall of stories is that audience members actually have to actively choose to watch them; they don’t just show up on their feed the way that a regular post does. So in order to gain an audience for your stories, you have to make sure to create interesting, engaging stories that hook people in and make them want to continue watching your stories day after day.
To help you out, we’ve gathered the best tips for getting people to watch your Instagram stories in 2023.
Get Interactive
One of the best things about stories is how easy they are to interact with. In addition to responding with comments and emojis, you can also post specific types of stories that allow for direct interaction. These include polls, questions, quizzes, and more. These features are a great way to turn a story from a monologue into a two-way conversation with your followers, engaging them and making them want to watch more stories in the future.
Use Exclusivity Marketing
One of the best ways to get people to tune into every single story you post is to use your stories as a place to announce special offers and discounts that you don’t post elsewhere. This way, audiences feel like they’re part of a special, exclusive club, which is highly psychologically motivating.
Use the Close Friends Feature
To build even more of a sense of community and exclusivity, try using Instagram’s close friends feature. This allows you to add users to a list of “close friends” and post stories that only they will see. They will also know that they’re on your close friends list because your exclusive stories will be marked with green borders instead of pink. This will tell your audience that they are special to you, creating an even stronger connection.
Be Authentic
Generally speaking, Instagram stories are a very casual and real medium that users use to post unfiltered, candid moments from their lives. Stories that are too polished or staged may be jarring and turn audiences off. So meet your followers where they are and aim to post authentic, genuine stories that make them feel like they’re truly getting to know the humans behind your brand.
Use Instagram Insights
Instagram’s powerful Insights tool doesn’t just give you data about how your posts are performing; it also shares important information about your stories including reach and impressions. These valuable metrics are important to track because they offer highly actionable insights about which of your stories are working and which aren’t. This way, you won’t continue to waste effort posting content types to your stories that your audience isn’t showing interest in.
Make Shareable Stories
Users have the option of sharing Instagram stories by sending them to other people in Instagram’s messaging feature. So if you create a story that’s interesting, useful, or engaging enough to be shareable, you can multiply your reach beyond even your following. By creating stories with valuable content, such as interesting fun facts, funny jokes, or useful tips and tools, you make your story much more shareable.
Tell a Story
If a video that you want to post to your story goes over 15 seconds in length, it will automatically post as multiple stories. And if you want to post multiple stories in a row and actually get your audience to view all of them, it’s important to make them, well, tell a story.
Make sure the first story of the series contains some form of hook that makes people want to keep watching until the next. And then after that, aim to make each story lead naturally into the following one so that people stay tuned to hear the ending of the story you’re telling.
Use Captions
Only 29% of Instagram users always have their sound on when watching stories, meaning that there is a high likelihood that at least some of your viewers are watching your stories on mute. To ensure that they still get the important information from your story, make sure to add captions. This will make your story accessible to all of your followers, including those with hearing impairments and those who voluntarily keep their phones muted.
Know the Algorithm
Last, but certainly not least, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the Instagram story algorithm and how it works so you can use it to your advantage. By following these tips, you’ll increase the chances that Instagram will display your stories more prominently to your followers.
- Encourage interaction – In addition to making your stories more engaging, encouraging followers to interact will signal to Instagram that your stories have good content in them and should be displayed prominently.
- Post your best content first – The fewer people that watch your stories, the less prominently Instagram will want to display them. This means that, if you want to post multiple stories a day, start off strong with the content you think is most likely to get lots of views.
- Wait 24 hours – If you post a story that doesn’t perform well, wait 24 hours to reset the algorithm before posting new stories.
- Space stories throughout the day – Try posting your stories at relatively even intervals throughout the day, which will help your story keep bouncing back to the front of your followers’ lists.
- Post a story at the end of the day – According to Later’s Social Content Lead, Lindsay Ashcraft, adding a new story at the very end of the day before midnight gives all of them an extra boost in views.
Instagram Stories Made Easy With Promo
The number of stories you can post in a single day is only limited by the number that you can create. To make it as easy as possible to make high-quality videos for your social media accounts, Promo’s online video maker is designed to be super user-friendly.
Whether you upload your own images and videos or rely on our library of millions of stock photos and videos, you’ll be able to quickly create Instagram stories for your account. You can even customize one of our thousands of pre-made templates to save even more time.
Now get out there and tell your story.
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