How to Use Instagram Stories to Increase Engagement with Your Brand

One of your ultimate goals with Instagram marketing is to boost customer engagement with your brand. The good news is that Instagram Stories is an excellent way of improving engagement with customers within the stories themselves and your overall Instagram profile.

Take a look at how you can use Instagram Stories to improve the rate at which customers engage with your brand.

Use Story Stickers to Encourage Conversations

The easiest method of using Stories to boost your overall engagement on Instagram is to use them as conversation starters.

Instagram makes this easy with the use of story stickers that let you do the following:

• Take a poll.
• Ask a question.
• Have users vote on an A/B question.
• Ask questions with the emoji slider.
• Encourage questions (via “ask us” stickers, and then respond to them).

When asking a question, you can leave it open-ended and let your followers write their answers. Or you can ask a multiple-choice question to reduce the effort required from respondents.

Why This Works

When you use stickers for any of these things in your stories, you are directly inviting your followers to respond. Even better, they can do so in a single click in the case of polls or asking A/B questions. When answering open-ended questions, their answer can be as short or as long as they want.

As with anything else, by making it easy for your followers to interact with you, you increase the chances that they will do so.

On top of that, these questions and polls show your followers that you care about what they have to say. This does wonders for your brand reputation. It may also encourage them to comment on your other posts or stories since they know you respond to consumers.

As a bonus, this type of interactive story is a great way to get feedback from followers. Use that feedback to decide what product or service to offer next or how to market a product.

Use Other Types of Stickers to Encourage Action

The already-mentioned stickers directly boost engagement, but there are also stickers that can encourage other types of action.

• Shoppable Stickers

  Shoppable stickers are another noteworthy type of story sticker. These can directly boost sales and engagement and are simple to incorporate into your stories.

• Countdown Stickers

  Using a countdown sticker lets you create a sense of urgency, encouraging your followers to buy something, participate in a contest, or complete other time-limited actions. This strategy plays on the fear of missing out.

• Swipe Up Links

  While not a sticker, swipe-up links are important. Once your Instagram account has 10,000 followers, you will be able to include it. Use the swipe-up link to send followers to specific landing pages to maximize conversions and engagement.

Interesting Stories Make People Interested in Your Brand

Even without an interactive element in your Stories, you can use them to boost overall brand engagement. After all, if you create an interesting story, viewers may decide to look at your profile or other content, or they may decide to follow you.

So, creating engaging, interesting, and fun stories, combined with boosting engagement in those Stories, can lead to an increase in overall followers.

Save Stories to Highlights

One key feature of Instagram Stories is that they last only 24 hours. But if you create an amazing story that you think will do wonders for engagement, you can keep it around by saving it to your Highlights. Those appear on your profile page and remain visible until you remove them.

As a bonus tip, add “covers” to your highlights for a consistent aesthetic. Just tap on the highlight in question, tap the three dots in the bottom right corner, select “Edit Highlights,” and choose “Edit Cover.”

How to Boost Story Engagement

We already discussed how you could use story stickers to boost engagement with customers. But the following strategies and tips will also let you boost story engagement. Remember that, when done correctly, these practices can translate into more followers and brand engagement.

• Use Hashtags

  When you include hashtags in your story, the story will show up if someone searches for the hashtag in question. As such, using popular hashtags can increase your views. As with any other hashtags, you want to strike a balance between popularity and competitiveness. It’s also best to stick to hashtags that are relevant to your brand.

  What if you don’t want your hashtags to be visible in your story? Just place a sticker on top of them.

• Use Location Hashtags or Geotags

  In addition to hashtags in general, do your best to use location hashtags or geotags. This is especially important for small, local businesses with a physical location. Using either of these types of tags can even boost engagement by 79%.

  Remember that, like hashtags, geolocations are something people can search for. As such, using either geotags or location-based hashtags lets you expand your reach beyond just your followers.

• Post at Least One Story a Day

  Part of the power behind stories is their ability to put you at the top of the feed. To make sure you stay there, get in the habit of posting one story at least every 24 hours. That way, there will always be at least one active story.

• Share Posts in Your Stories

  You don’t have to come up with all of the content for your stories yourself. Use them as a way to share user-generated content related to your brand. You can even share posts about your industry in general and add a brief caption about your take on it.

• Plan Stories

  As with any other content on Instagram, consider planning your stories out at least a few days or weeks in advance. This will let you deliver consistency in terms of branding and messaging.

Conclusion

Creating interactive Stories is an excellent way to boost your engagement on Instagram and attract more followers. For even better results, be strategic with your stories, such as using location tags and sharing others’ posts, to improve engagement with the stories themselves.