6 Tactics To Boost Your Engagement With Instagram Stories

Did you know that 500 million people are using Instagram stories daily? Instagram Stories is a fun, free, and effective tool to engage with the audience, even if they don’t see your posts in their feed. If done right, Instagram Stories could drive more traffic to your company's website and generate more leads!

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How to Boost Your Engagement With Instagram Stories

In this article, let’s take a look at the 6 TACTICS for getting more views & boosting your Instagram Stories engagement! 

1. Nail your message in 3s

We all know that Instagram Stories last 24 hours before disappearing, and a video inside the IG Stories can be up to 15 seconds long. However, as users switch their IG stories to the other very quickly, your story should be a short length video and send a direct message.

Tip: Give your audiences a clear and attractive message within the first 3 seconds of your story. So even though the user just watched a few seconds and left, they can see what you want to deliver to them.  

Using too much text, small text, and lacking CTA are the most popular problems around IG stories. To demonstrate how ineffective it is, let’s take a look at these examples below!

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On the other hand, brands like @bolt, @boltfood.ae, and @biteable have a better way to deliver their message. Their IG stories are great for several reasons:

• It has a bright background with good visual
• The text and illustration are placed almost perfectly
• You can see what’s it about from the first glance
• It has a clear call-to-action (download, or learn more)

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2. Use the widescreen creatively

The Instagram story is one of the largest screens (1080x1420) that can show the advertisement on mobile. To utilize this special feature, you can divide the widescreen and showcase various views and types of products in an intriguing way!

For example, @espoir_makeup divided the screen and compared the color of their lipsticks. This made users easier to choose the color because the ads include virtual try-on lipsticks.

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Health food brand @batchorganics showed different types of smoothies that it is selling and at the end of the video, it added the promotion that urged the followers to shop now to get a discount on its tasteful offer!

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3. Insert actions that you are familiar with

By utilizing Instagram Stories features like “swipe up”, “tab”, and “repost an Instagram post”, brands can showcase more information by linking other sources and increase the conversion rate.

Have a look at @zapier’s webinar promotion Instagram story. They shared Instagram posts on their stories in their feeds and added direct swipe-up links to register at the webinar.

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@postmates used the tap feature to make users interact with their Instagram Story! As the Instagram Story picture changes when users tap, they put a different picture that looks like the user is breaking the glass when they tap the picture. When they finally reach the end of the post, where the users can use its code to place an order!

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4. Provide an environment to communicate with users

Stickers are always fun, and it is also an effective tool to engage with the audiences. Brands using stickers like a poll, emoji slider, question stickers, quiz, can better communicate and interact with their audiences.

Dunkin Donuts(@dunkin) ran an Instagram Stories Poll ad with a survey sticker on Instagram Story. What makes this ad great is the playful visual, clear question, and simple CTA (in this case, audiences can answer the survey by just tabbing on the screen)!

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To compare performance, Dunkin Donuts also proceeded with the normal version without stickers other than the Poll version. What would have been the result?

Advertising with survey stickers lowers the cost per video by 20% compared to the normal version without stickers. It introduced the new product naturally as well!

H&M kids(@hm_kids) used emoji slider features to ask how much users enjoy their items. As the emoji slider captures answers on a sliding scale, we can understand your audience accurately through the slider.

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5. Add product stickers to show more of your product

Have you heard about Shoppable Instagram Stories? It allows brands to tag physical products, and allows audiences to view its name, price and make a purchase without leaving the app! 

That’s why tagging the product with Instagram story stickers is a great way to leverage your Instagram stories! You can show the product details without looking too much like sales or spam. See how @soludos, a shoe brand, used product stickers in its stories!

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Another example comes from @birdbrooklyn who also used product stickers to showcase and make sales to the new product line!

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6. Repost Customers’ Reactions

Reposting user-generated content (UGC) on Instagram Stories is a great way to tell stories about your products by sharing the actual responses and opinions from your customers! By giving them good incentives to feature your product/service, brands can generate a huge number of organic content and tap into their follower communities. 

Below are some examples of how brands are reposting customer’s positive reactions when they receive the products!

Looking for more ways to boost your engagement with UGC? Check out 5 Tips and Best Practices to help brands build trust and grow sales with UGC campaigns!

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There are still tons of ways that you can get your creative juices flowing and increase your engagement with Instagram stories. Next time, let’s try incorporating these tips into your plan and see how your audience responds to it!

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