Imagine your brand is able to directly engage with its users. Well, since 2016 this is possible with the ever-growing Instagram Story feature. This feature enables users to post a photo or video to their profile under the story section that will disappear after 24 hours. This opened a whole new world for content creators to create even more engaging content. Here are five things you need to know about Instagram Stories:
- It’s interactive
Instagram stories take engagement with your followers to the next level with clickable engagement buttons. These engagement buttons include voting polls, slider buttons, question boxes and quiz features. These interactive buttons make your content not just a one-way tool to communicate but enforces two-way communication, and real-time participation in your content you have created.
- Go live
With Instagram’s story feature, you can now broadcast live to all your followers from wherever you are, LIVE ON THE SPOT! A live video streams right from the device you are using. This is especially helpful during product launches, unboxing experiences, visually exciting events, media visits, product photo shoots or filming. Users can post comments during the live broadcast, to which the broadcaster can directly respond to on the live video. Live videos can also be saved and posted as an Instagram story for 24 hours.
- Swipe up
Accounts with more than 10 000 followers can create a story with a link attached. The link will then be live for the user by swiping up. Swipe up is useful to direct users to a particular website without having to navigate out of the posted story.
- Story collections
Although stories disappear to your followers after 24 hours, they are saved in the brand’s story archives to access at a later stage. You can then compile Story Collections by using the archive option. Pull the archived stories to your profile and save in different story albums.
- Story reposting
Followers can also mention a brand in their story, to which the brand will get a notification that they have been mentioned. The brand can then repost the user’s story as part of their own story, which is a great way of sharing user-generated content in a unique way and include followers in your brand’s story.
-Article by Peter Pentz (Hatch Comminication)