A Complete Guide: How To Use Instagram Stories For Brands [2020]

1) Feature Your Audience 

People exactly love to see them getting featured in brand stories. Featuring an audience is an intelligent strategy followed by almost all Influencers for brand marketing. Featuring customers in your brand stories shows them how much you value them. It emphasizes that they are a part of your brand. Use the mention feature to show your attention to your audience. Tagging customers and followers with a personalized message will send them a notification, increasing the chances of the users seeing your content. Remember not to do over tagging, which might make them lose interest. 

2) Post Behind The Scenes

Almost all customers are more curious to see what happens off the camera. People find it more interesting to see raw and unworked images than images and videos captured with perfect lighting. Showing real moments, funny clips during a business meeting, the manufacturing phase of your product are kinds of potential content that your audience will never take away their eyeballs. If you want your brand to get more exposure on Instagram Story, posting scenes behind the camera can work perfectly.

3) Join With Influencers

Collaborating with Influencers is an excellent mode of brand promotion where Influencers take control of your brand’s Instagram account for a particular period. Influencer takeovers yield several equal benefits to both the brand and the Influencer. Be sure to choose the right Influencer that matches with your niche and brand before starting ahead for making your Influencer marketing campaign more successful. After this, you need to allow enough time to promote the campaign. As a final step, define the KPIs and metrics that you would track to measure the campaign. 

4) Create Instagram Polls, Questions, and Quizzes

Polls are an excellent way to promote brands. People would be more interested in getting involved in doing some tasks from which you can get valuable feedback to improve your brand or even launch new products. You can increase Instagram engagement substantially when you encourage user participation in Polls. Identifying the right and benefitting question to your audience is essential before jumping to create the poll.

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Question stickers on Instagram are an excellent engagement opportunity facilitating the audience to submit questions directly to you. Now you can view their questions and post relevant answers. Glosser is a famous brand that uses this feature to allow the audience to ask questions about skincare, makeup, and beauty and provide solutions to their questions from people working in their company or experts.

5) StoryTelling

Posting Instagram stories of the same topic in small series or fragments can keep your audience engaged with your profile. For example, you can tell stories about your company’s growth or the manufacturing of products in your company. 

6) Use Instagram Live

Instagram Live is a new feature that allows you to provide live and engaging content to your audience. Going live on Instagram stories can be more fun and productive at the same time. When more viewers tune in, your videos often keep rotating and then end. Also, it is worth mentioning that going live on Instagram, boosts more followers for your Instagram account.

7) Add Links To Stories

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Your brand needs to have a verified account on Instagram to share a link to your story. To get your account verified, you need to have 10,000 followers for your account. So it is optimal to do all tasks that can increase your follower count dramatically because a link in an Instagram story is a great way to navigate people to your website and other social media accounts. So promoting your brand through Instagram stories can get you skyrocketing results. 

8) Share Snippets of Stories

Sharing a short preview of Instagram story videos can help you keep users stay with your content for a longer time. Long-form articles on blogs can also be promoted on stories by showing a little portion of the article’s beginning, which makes users more curious to see the rest of the article. Allowing the user to swipe up to see the full story helps make people watch the full video of stories. 

Arousing the curiosity of your followers is more important to increase stories engagement.

9) Mix different styles

Instead of posting stories in the same style, try posting different types of stories. Also, keep in mind to plan appropriately before posting content because you can get success only if you post the right content for the audience. Identify the right time to post stories as you will end up with nothing on posting at the wrong time when your followers are not active. Posting content in different combinations can make your audience find your content interesting. Creating a calendar of schedule for posting content can make your users aware of when you post new content. Posting tutorial videos for Tuesdays are a great way to boost Instagram stories engagement.