How to use Instagram Stories to Get Real with your Audience
Having a better idea of who the person is behind the brand builds rapport, and breaks down the mystery!
Instagram stories and Instagram live are great ways to showcase your brand’s personality, behind-the-scenes peeks at your life or business, and to promote or highlight content that you created for your target audience. Let’s explore how Instagram stories can benefit your business content marketing efforts.
On Instagram, You Need to Grab Their Attention, Quick!
Marketing research has shown that you have approximately eight seconds to grab your audience’s attention. Developing the skill to grab attention every time is a fine art. That’s probably why marketers feel like attention is such a big challenge, especially when they know people are interested in what they have to offer.
What’s so special about Instagram?
Instagram, a visual social network, is growing in popularity among individuals and businesses. Engagement on Instagram is ten times higher than on Facebook and 84 times higher than on Twitter. People love to talk, share, and build relationships.
Instagram is great for building trust. Consumers surveyed by Marketplace in 2016 said that they trust brands more simply because they saw them on Instagram. That’s huge!
Instagram Goes Live, Like Snapchat
Aside from sharing photos with captions, Instagram allows you to share stories or go live on video. Stories allow you to create short video clips or sets of images that disappear after 24 hours. Going live allows you to notify followers that you are creating a video in real-time, and they can choose to watch it.
Going Live Helps Build Trust
These features are another great way to build trust with your target audience. Sharing videos or slideshows of you, your products, or something else of interest to your audience allows them to get to know you. Having a better idea of who the person is behind the brand builds rapport, and breaks down the mystery! People are more likely to remember someone for something they did or for who they are than for what their business does.
How to Create Instagram Stories
Step 1: Adjust your story settings by clicking the week in the upper right-hand corner of your profile page. Click on story settings and pick your desired option for replies (e.g. from nobody, everybody, or just people you follow).
Step 2: On your feed, tap your profile picture with the blue + symbol from the top left-hand corner, and click to enable camera and/or microphone access.
Step 3: Choose a post option: Live, Normal, Boomerang, or Hands-Free.
Step 4: Record a video or take a photo.
Step 5: Edit options will come up, so you can add filters, emojis, drawings, or text.
Step 6: Save your story to your device from the icon in the lower-left corner, or chose the arrow for more options (e.g. send to select people or create a new group). Once you save, your story will post to Instagram.
Can I Schedule Instagram Stories?
You can schedule Instagram stories to pop up on your phone in advance if you use Tailwind. It’s a great feature that I love using! It saves me time, and I don’t have to remember to create Instagram stories on the go — I just need to take the time to post them with the help of the Tailwind for Instagram reminder feature.
If you haven’t tried Tailwind for Instagram yet, give it a try!
How to Go Live on Instagram
Step 1: Adjust your story settings by clicking the week in the upper right-hand corner of your profile page. Click on story settings and pick your desired option for replies (e.g. from nobody, everybody, or just people you follow).
Step 2: On your feed, tap your profile picture with the blue + symbol from the top left-hand corner, and click to enable camera and/or microphone access.
Step 3: Choose the Live post option, and click start live video when you are ready to go live on video.
Step 4: Manage your live broadcast by seeing the number of viewers in the upper left corner of the screen, and the comments at the bottom of the screen. You can respond to comments or simply assess the engagement of your audience.
Tip: to disable commenting tap on the three dots on the lower right-hand side of the screen and select turn off commenting.
Step 5: End the broadcast by tapping end live video in the upper right corner. Doing this will bring up the analytics screen.
Tip: Your live video will not be saved to your Instagram story and you can’t view it again.
Step 6: Review your analytics from the analytics screen to determine what percentage of your followers engaged with your video.
Why Go Live if it Doesn’t Save?
Going live might seem like a crazy choice since it’s a video that doesn’t save. But, it’s not! Going live sends a notification to your followers that don’t normally have notifications turned on for your posts. It’s a great way to get them to see your content that they might otherwise miss.
Going live or sharing a story allows you to reach the masses for free. These options have high interaction rates and are easy to use. This gives Instagram live and stories a fairly high return on investment compared to other social media efforts.
Give Instagram stories or Instagram live a try and start to build better relationships with your audience today!
