If you haven’t used Instagram Stories for your business yet, now is the time! Stories can help you get Instagram followers by building brand awareness, growing engagement and driving traffic. To get the most out of this innovative feature you need to invest some time in creating an Instagram Stories game plan. The following tips will help.
How Often to Post
In contrast to regular posts that are subject to the Instagram algorithm, the social site won’t come down on you for posting too many Stories. Because Stories are only available for 24 hours (as of the writing of this article), Instagram doesn’t have to prioritize posts on the feed.
When to Post
With standard posts, you need to post when Instagram followers are most active. This isn’t the case with Stories. Because Instagram Stories exist for 24 hours, chances are greater that your followers will be able to see your story. What this means is that even if you post your story when the majority of your followers are sleeping, they’ll be able to see it at the top of their feeds when they get up.
What to Post
Like any social media based post, if you’re using Stories to grow Instagram followers, it’s best to post a combination of lighthearted, fun and promotional content. The great thing about Stories is that you can really get creative with them. There’s a ton of great apps available as well that make creating high-quality stories easy.
When you’re establishing your Instagram Stories strategy, make sure that they incorporate your brand goals. This is also true for promotional content. There are a number of great ways to use Stories to get Instagram followers, including sharing polls, asking questions, tagging other accounts, sharing IGTV and using Instagram Stories Highlights.
Hashtag and Location Stickers
When Instagram first introduced the ability to add stickers to Stories, they were more fun than useful. Since then, Instagram has added a lot of innovative capabilities to stickers, such as the ability to view location focused Stories on the Explore page and the ability to search for Stories by location and hashtag. Using these stickers will increase your discoverability and grow your Instagram followers.
Use Links
Once you have over 10 thousand Instagram followers, driving traffic with Stories is fairly straight forward. Users will be able to swipe up on Stories that contain a website address and be redirected where ever you want them to go. This means that you’ll be able to send your target audience to your website, a landing page, blog, etc. It’s a given that having the ability to send followers to specific pages from Stories is incredibly beneficial. Whether you’re sending followers to an important blog post, or a product page, you can use Stories to drive Instagram traffic and get even more followers.
If you want to get more Instagram followers in 2019, start experimenting with Stories and Stories ads (styles and formats), to figure out which one resonate with your target audience the most.
