Instagram craves originality and new ideas. Your strategy should adapt as features on the platform change and insights are revealed.
Engagement is one of the most powerful aspects of building your following on Instagram. Here are our favourite Story hacks to boost your engagement:
1. Create Value: Aim to Entertain, Inspire, Educate or Persuade
Before you post anything, ask yourself what value this is bringing your audience. Does it entertain, inspire, educate, or persuade the viewer? Generally, if it doesn’t fall under one of these categories, keep that content for yourself.
2. Know your audience
What’s your niche? Who follows you?
Use your Instagram Story analytics to identify what content best performs on your Stories.
Get creative with testing new styles to see how they perform before adding them into your regular rotation.
Do your viewers crave dozens of Stories a day, or are your view counts decreasing with each one? If the more Stories you post in a day correlate with a decrease in views, hold back on those regular updates. Viewer fatigue can be real - let the viewer wonder about you between each update and space your Stories out throughout the day.
3. Post Interactive Stories
Every minute on Instagram, 695,000 Stories are shared.
Viewers have so many options for what to engage with, if your Story doesn’t catch their attention right away, they will swipe out of it before hearing the second note of the song.
Read the room – if your interactive components aren’t getting responses, try publishing fewer of them or mixing up the topic.
Here are our favourite interactive components to use in your Stories:
- Ask a question
- Publish a poll/survey
- Post a quiz
- Link to a URL
Use links to bring value to your audience by showcasing new blog posts, YouTube videos, products and events they’d be interested in, and your merch/products.
4. Expand Your Audience
Why limit your Stories to your followers? Use Instagram Stories to attract new audiences!
- Use hashtags. Hootsuite recommends using 10 hashtags per Instagram Story for max visibility. Drag hashtags off screen unless it’s one you want to promote.
- Tag other accounts. Tag relevant accounts and brands. Like hashtags, drag account tags off screen unless it’s one you want to promote.
- Host an Instagram Live with someone with a similar niche as you. This is a great way for audiences to cross over. Users who watch Instagram lives are more likely to be engaged on your channel.
- Hop on Instagram Live solo to answer questions in real time. Keep it short to start and adjust timing based on results.
Promote your Story. Use your follower demographic to promote Stories to an audience similar to your existing one, or people who have previously visited or interacted with your page.
5. Create Dynamic Content
Grab the viewers’ attention!
Get creative and have fun with your design.
Here are some ways how:
- Alternate between video, static images and boomerangs. Just because you use static images, doesn’t mean you have to BE static.
- Use automated captions in your video. Whether your viewers are checking in with you in a public space or trying to keep quiet on their break, make it easy for your viewers to know what you’re saying.
- When sharing a feed post to your Story:
- Position the post on the right-hand side of the screen. This is where a viewer is most likely to tap when browsing and will increase the likelihood of click-throughs.
- Change the background colour. Automatic background colours can be off brand and unpleasing. Create your own background with the draw feature.
- Uncover a wider selection of colours by holding a colour down.
- Create cool effects with the draw and erase tools. Try colouring over the entire image and erasing a preview of it for click-bait.
- Add brand colours into your Story. Upload an image of your colour swatch using the image sticker and use the colour picker tool to draw with or use in your text. Don’t forget to delete the swatch when you’re done.
- When answering questions, share multiple answers on a single Story to entice viewers to stay on that one Story longer.
- Use the green screen feature in a video.
- Add music to your Story.
Psst, don’t forget to group Stories by relevant themes to create binge-worthy Instagram highlights!
