How Instagram Stories Can Enhance Account Growth

Over a year ago, Instagram has rolled out Stories, a feature that lets you post photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours, and pretty much like that of Snapchat’s My Story, you can also add filters, text, and drawings to your posts.

However, there is more to this feature than just fun and games.  You can use it for engagement growth, boost your brand, increase traffic to your site and more.

Why Should You Use Stories?

1. Swelling Figures

To start with, there are over 300 million Instagram users that use this feature on a daily basis.  With that incredible number of people, and still growing, already on the venue, you can expect a phenomenal party.

2. Anytime Is A Good Time

Unlike when you publish a post, you need to make sure that you have a strategy in place so that it can reach as much audience as possible.  You need to note down when your followers are most active and fire away on those times. But with Stories, you can ease yourself of such task since what you’ve posted there is visible within 24 hours, so you can just opt to publish on certain intervals, like 6-8 hours or in between 12 hours at most.

3. It Is Not Limiting

Although your Stories has a 24-hour shelf life, this does not mean that you have limited reach.  Anyone can view your Stories regardless if they are followers or non-followers.  You have a day to leave an impression, hence, make it worth their while.

4. Hashtags Hashtags

If you’ve been doing Instagram and other social networks for some time now, then you already know what this “#” character can do for your post.  But if you are still clueless on that, then you must first understand the reason why you need to use hashtags.

That said, you can add a hashtag to your Stories and with the right ones, you might even land on top of the feed when people do a search, hence Instagram makes you discoverable.

5. Skip The Clean Up

Before Stories came into play, you do most of your marketing through posting and in time, you’ve already accumulated, countless posts on your account.  It’s exhausting to look at, so you probably delete older posts.  To avoid this, you can post to your Stories and just leave it like that, it will save you time and keep your feed uncluttered.

6.  Reach Out

Aside from adding a hashtag to your Stories, you can also tag users.  This gesture would make other people feel that they are cherished, an important person.  For instance, you can tag some users when you have a promo, product launch or when you need inputs on your project.  Making someone feel wanted and special has its rewards.

7. Go Unnoticed 

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” remains golden wherever and you can expect unwanted followers like competitors who want to be on top of the game and stay up to date on your every move.  Sure you can block them but that also equates to losing a follower.  Instead, you can choose to hide your Stories from certain people.

8. Shush Without The Fuss

Sometimes, it’s annoying to see and hear from someone all the time.  But you don’t want to hurt their feelings so you just let them.  It’s the same with Stories, some users would post something every hour and it is really tiring that you are tempted to click on that ‘Unfollow’ button.  Don’t do anything rash as they could easily click on that same button. As an alternative, you can just mute them, no big drama and the likes.

How To Maximize Your Stories

Now that you know what Stories can do for you, it’s time to focus on how you can utilize it with minimum effort.  As always, planning is the key to everything, prepare a collection of quality contents and hashtags.

In addition, you can use Jarvee to automate this task for you and you can set it up in under 5 minutes through Campaigns.  If you’ve been using this automation tool, then you should be quite familiar with how to add a post to your campaign, otherwise, you can read more about it here.

To make the campaign publish the post to your Stories, go to Campaign Overview tab and check the option ‘Post as part of your story instead of on the wall” as seen on the image below.

💡 If you’ll be publishing the same image to multiple accounts, don’t forget to make the images unique.

Next, you can navigate to the When To Publish tab and schedule when the campaign is going to publish the post.  As mentioned, you can publish 2-3 Stories each day, so you can configure the settings in that manner.

💡 Being random is good, hence you can opt to randomize the publishing timers.

So you have your posts and timers in place, you are almost ready to start the campaign but before you do that, you can opt to tag users in your post.

To do this, you can go back to Campaign Overview tab, click Advanced Settings button then navigate to the Instagram tab, check the option ‘Tag specific users in your post’ and add as many users as you want.

💡 You can tag up to 10 people in your post, but 5 will do, for now.

 

Next, you may select to ‘Enable Dynamic Hashtags’, add a pool of hashtags.  Don’t set it to post too many hashtags, it’s distracting and looks desperate, 3-5 hashtags per post should be good enough.  But of course, you can always do more if you want.