Everyone puts up creative and interesting Instagram stories. You might be putting up your stories as well, but do you promote your business through Instagram stories? If you check Instagram stories of your friends, you might be aware that they are alluring! Before you know, you end up checking almost all the stories put up by your friends!
If you check Instagram Business Insights, you will come to know about the number of people that clicked on the next story after reading yours. Instagram stories is a powerful tool and it has the potential to engage people and make them click on the links that you want them to check out, and this is why it is the perfect platform to promote your business.
Here are 14 interesting and smart ways to promote your brand profile and increase user engagement though Instagram stories:
Story Highlights
The story highlights feature provided by Instagram is a complete game changer! For the individual users, highlights provide a sneak peek into their updates and events. But in case of a business brand, if they are able to pin the stories on the top of the profile, it acts as an extension of your bio. If you wish to promote your business you can use Instagram highlights to tell your audience about who you are and what you do. You can create stories for the purpose of being the highlights with an interesting and an eye-catching cover and your Instagram page will start looking as a business brochure! You can make use of alluring covers that will hold the attention of the users for a longer time.
Announcements
As the Instagram stories can be put up and viewed instantly, it is a good idea to feature your company’s announcements on them. You can share announcements of new products, new services, new staff members or just general updates.
You can share behind-the-scenes updates of your company so that people know how you are working out something. This is the information that won’t be featured on your feeds. This will make your followers believe that they are getting the latest updates about your company and they will also get to know your better.
You can share anything right from packaging a new product or having fun or playing a prank on your colleagues. This will portray the human side of your company and this will create a great positive impact on your brand awareness.
Collaborations
Instagram is a great platform that brings brands and influencers together. You can partner with other relevant businesses that you think your followers can benefit from. Or you can also collaborate with a customer who is an influencer as well.
Just to let you know, some of these collaborations might be paid ones; especially if they involve influencers. There are many ways through which you can collaborate through Instagram stories so when you wish to put up a story, you need to first think about how your business will benefit from it.
Related : 10 Instagram Marketing Trends For 2019
Polls
Boring customer questionnaires have become completely old school now! This is the time of creating interesting pools and getting your answers with just a tap. Creating polls in your Instagram stories provides you with a great opportunity to communicate with your followers. You can also use polls for conducting market research, getting customer feedback, to know your audience better or to just have some fun!
Creating interesting polls provide endless possibilities! You have to think of a creative campaign that is specific to your business and brand.
Questions
There is a question sticker available when you post Instagram stories. With the use of this stiker, you can ask any question to your audience and ask them to answer or you can also invite your audience to ask you questions. This is a very effective feature for building community and encouraging customer interaction.
By asking a relevant question, you show that you care about your customer’s opinion and when your customers answer questions for you, your business brand is positioned as a reliable brand that is backed by customer loyalty.
Reaction Slider
The slider sticker provided by Instagram can be a fun addition to your Instagram stories and through this sticker, you can ask your audience to respond to your stories.
For instance, if you have posted some content updates, you can mention them in your new Instagram story along with a slider sticker and ask people to rate it. This is a good strategy to increase the engagement rate.
Most of the times, the slider sticker is used with heart eyes but there are many other creative ways as well to use the slider in your Instagram stories.
Related : What Is The Potential Of Instagram As Your Marketing Channel?
Countdown
The countdown feature is a new addition to Instagram stories. Use of this sticker will help you to promote competitions, announcements and new product launches.
Your users can set reminders for the countdown deadline and the companies receive this data and through this data they get to know how many people are the most engaged.
Links
The links feature is only available to Instagram accounts with 10k followers or more. If your business account has 10k or more followers, then you have the privilege of adding external links in your Instagram stories.
Instagram does not allow any functioning links to be posted anywhere apart from the bio. People might or might not read your bio always but they will surely check your Instagram story as it is quick and it is great if you can feature an important link in your Instagram story. The link present in your story will redirect the users to a browser present within Instagram.
Location Stickers
Instagram is a great platform for building a community and for bringing people who share the same interests together. When you tag your location, you increase the possibility of your business brand getting discovered. When you tag a location, your story will also be added to that location’s official story. As a result of this, the people who don’t follow you will also be able to see your story. This is a quick, simple and effective Instagram trick that will help you to get more impressions for your stories.
#Hashtag Stickers
Similar to location stickers, hashtag stickers have the same impact. When you add a story with a particular hashtag, your story will also be incorporated in a larger story source that is created with that respective hashtag. Before you post a story with a hashtag, you can perform a research about the most trending and currently used hashtags so that you are able to reach a wider audience and you can secure a competitive edge as well.
Over To You…
Some of the best used features and stickers for putting up Instagram stories are mentioned above, and there are many more that you can use. Ideally you can go through all the stickers available for Instagram stories and think about how you can use them in your next story. It is also possible for you to track the performance of your Instagram stories through Instagram’s story performance feature. So go ahead, get creative, keep posting stories and keep checking what works best for your business brand. As you keep posting stories consistently, your audience will get more engaged and you will keep getting better response for your stories.
