How to get the most out of Instagram Featured Stories?

Instagram for business

One of the characteristics that has had the best reception from users areStories, also known asInstagramstories . Although at first they were somewhat controversial due to the fact that they were identical to theSnapchatservice , they were able to quickly penetrate the taste of the young public and today position themselves as one of the favorite characteristics of the users of this important social network.

According to data from Instagram, every day more than 300 million people watch and / or share stories with theirfollowers, which is a number that far exceeds the number of active users on Twitter, for example, which is one of the pioneers of the networks social and continues to be one of the most important because of what it represents.

If you have a company and you want to venture into corporatesocial networks , but you have not dared because you do not know which would be the most appropriate,

This way you will make a much better informed decision based on specific aspects of yourbusiness suchas the industry in which it operates and also the target whose needs you want to satisfy.

Now, if you have already chosen that you want to be on Instagram and you are taking your first steps in this social network, there are several things that you should take into account:

1.- You need a business profile.

In this way you can have access to better features for corporate users of this platform. It is very easy to have a business account, it is free and the only thing that is requested is to have aFacebookfan pagewhich you can connect to your Instagram profile.

In any case, you do not have to worry if you are not too active on Facebook, the creation of thisfan pagemay be a mere procedure that you must complete to have access to the Instagram business profile.

The difference between a personal profile and abusiness profileof this social network is that the second type gives you access to important data and metrics that can be very useful when producing the publications. In addition, something that personal profiles also do not have is the possibility of making publications with paid promotion, which allows you to have much more reach in them when you do them with an adequate strategy.

2.- You must keep up to date.

Instagram is one of those social networks that is updating its services practically every 10 days. Its creators work tirelessly so that their platform is constantly evolving and in this way maintain the interest of users who are exposed to different social networks, so they cannot afford to let the competition overtake them.

The use of all Instagram features, whether new or pre-existing, in addition to giving a very interesting dynamism to your profile, also brings you benefits since the Instagram algorithm gives greater visibility to those accounts that use a large part of the functions offered by the platform.

As we mentioned earlier, stories is a relatively recent feature of Instagram, they were introduced in 2016 to compete with Snapchat, which was at its best, having managed to gather more than 200 million young users in a very short time.

The Instagramstrategygave good results and the inclusion of this functionality made many people use this social network more. In its beginnings, it was only allowed to upload photos and videos with a maximum duration of 10 seconds that would be automatically deleted after 24 hours of their publication.

Stories are a great Instagram feature for a number of reasons:

• They don’t always need a lot of production. The fact that we know they will be removed after 24 hours gives you permission to play around with spontaneity by uploading material that doesn’t necessarily have to be as polished as what you upload to your traditional profile.
• The features of the stories make them very attractive to users. You can make stories with texts, videos, images, add gifs,stickers, usehashtags, tag users, share other users’ posts in your own story (as long as the account is public), do qualitative or quantitative surveys, place countdowns, among many others. All these functions are very useful to increase theengagementrate .
• By appearing at the top of the app, users are more likely to see stories as they have a very short lifespan, which gives a certain sense of urgency. Normal posts can be viewed at any time as they will be there forever, but stories are not the same, so they must be viewed before they are removed.
• Stories also help position and traffic on your profile when you use them correctly. When a user shows interest in your stories, they will continue to appear among the first so that they do not miss them, which will also affect the visits to your profile.

In addition to all this there is a way that you can get the benefits of the traditional profile and that of the stories.This is with the featured stories option:

Thestories highlightedare those that appear at the bottom of the biography of your profile and can stay there for as long as you want convenient since they do not expire as normal stories. This makes them an excellent tool that can give you very positive results if you follow the recommendations below:

• Use them to separate by category.For example, if your business is a baby clothing store, you can use the featured stories to show what clothes you have available by age and gender. This is something that the author Sascha Barboza does on her Instagram account and allows people to see only information that interests them.
• As the name implies,you can use this feature to highlight current promotions or new products.Then, when the promotion expires or the product is no longer particularly new, you can remove the entire featured story from your profile and voila.
• You can add featured stories to categories that you have previously created. That is, to upload featured stories they do not have to be all at that time, you can add them over time as appropriate.
• Useattractive names for your featured stories, as well as a good opening image that is high enough for people to want to know what else is there. If you don’t choose an Instagram name for them, it will use “featured story” by default, which is not at all attractive. Keep in mind that these names must be short so that they can appear complete – without clipping – under the category.
• Periodically takea look at the views that have uploaded your featured stories. So you can see which ones are the best performers and give more content of that type to your audience since you have verified that they are interested.
• Something that you must take into account and is vital for the success of your featured stories,is their quality because they will be fixed on your profile. People will have access to them without expiring, so you should put a little more effort into their content and aesthetics, enough to make them worth highlighting.

Now that you know the recommendations for you to use thefeatured stories,you can put them into practice, which will give your profile more visibility and deliver the information in a much more orderly way to your users.