7 Ways to Make Your Instagram Stories More Engaging
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In recent years, Instagram Stories have surged in popularity. Increasingly, Instagram users are viewing Stories even more than in-feed posts. Those circles at the top of the app are just so enticing! Today on the blog, I’m diving into how you can make your Instagram Stories more engaging for your audience. People on the internet love to share their opinions and feel heard, so making it interactive is key. Here are seven ways to create engaging content for Insta Stories:
1) Polls
Polls are a fun way to interact with your audience on Instagram! They are super simple, as they don’t require much effort for you to set up or for your followers to respond. When you tap the sticker icon (the smiling square with a folded corner), select the polls sticker. From there, you can enter your question and two possible answers. By default, it populates “Yes” and “No,” but you can type anything you like in there, as long as it’s 24 characters or less. To be funny, sometimes people will put options like “Yes” and “Yes, but in green.”
The poll will remain up for 24 hours. Afterwards, you can share the results or simply use it as feedback for yourself or your business. Another exciting way to use polls is for brackets. For example, I once saw a restaurant run a bracket, March Madness-style, to see what their customers’ favorite special edition chicken wing sauce was so they could add it to the menu long-term. This is a great way to make your followers feel heard and have some fun while you’re at it!
2) Questions Sticker
The questions sticker is one of my favorite tools for making Instagram Stories more interactive! This can go two ways: you can let your audience ask you questions, or you can ask them to answer a question. For brands, you could let an influencer or employee take over for the day to do an “Ask Me Anything” in Stories. You could also use a Q&A like this to prepare for going live later on, giving the speaker a chance to prepare for common questions that might be asked.
The questions sticker is also an excellent way to get feedback on new products or services! You can simply ask your followers, “What new offerings would you like to see from us?” and they can respond in a free form text box. This often helps drum up insights and ideas you might not otherwise hear!
3) Quizzes
You can access quizzes in the same place as polls and the questions sticker, under the sticker icon. When setting up a quiz, you can enter a question and four possible answers, with only one right answer. The quiz will run for 24 hours. This is a great feature for things like a pop quiz! For an educational brand, you could quiz followers on informative content you shared in a recent post. Or, you could implement a weekly feature like Trivia Tuesday, where you regularly run quizzes in your Stories. You could even offer small prizes for a lucky winner each week!
4) Going Live & Countdowns
Both Facebook and Instagram prioritize live video content in their algorithms, boosting up accounts when they go live. An Instagram Live doesn’t have to be spontaneous, it can be planned in advance. Perhaps you have a collaborator you’re featuring or a new product to demo--announce it in advance so you can build up excitement for it! You can even put a countdown in your Stories, and your followers can add the countdown to their own calendars to be reminded of when your live or event is happening. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is known for her engaging Instagram Lives, where she cooks a meal at home and answers questions for her constituents. It’s a great way to be more accessible to your audience!
5) Emoji Slider
One of the easiest ways to prompt your audience to interact is by adding an emoji slider in your Story. The emoji slider is a bar you can slide from left to right indicating how much you agree with whatever emoji it’s set as. So you can slide over heart eyes, 100, fire emoji, clapping hands--to show your appreciation for it! This is a simple and fun way to get folks to engage with your content, whether it’s food photos from your restaurant or snapshots of a recent event.
6) Phone Backgrounds & Templates
Phone backgrounds may not be relevant for every business, but they can be an effective way of building brand loyalty for some! For artists especially, it can be a neat, easy freebie to show appreciation for your followers. Typically, they’ll share a picture of the wallpaper with text over it, like “Need a new wallpaper? Screenshot next slide.” Then the second slide will be the artwork on its own. Usually at the bottom, the artist will incorporate their Instagram handle in a smaller font. This can work for other types of brands, too, though. For example, a university might share snapshots from around campus that alumni can use as phone backgrounds!
Story templates are also great for engaging your audience! One common example is “This or That” templates. These can be customized depending on your brand. “This or That” for a bookstore, for example, could look like “This or that? Sci fi or fantasy? Poolside reading or cozy fall reading?” Followers screenshot the template, upload it to their own Stories, and circle their answers. Then, they tag your account and share the Story with their followers! It’s an amazing way to increase your reach and build community.
7) Gifs
Last but not least, gifs are an incredibly fun and playful way to show off your brand’s personality. A beautiful photo or informative graphic is great, but throw a Spongebob or Schitt’s Creek gif on it, and you may have just made someone in your target audience laugh or smile. Just be thoughtful when selecting gifs and make sure you know its context. Also, be careful not to go overboard with gifs! One or two is plenty; no Story needs 12 gifs.
There you have it! Seven simple ways to make your Instagram Stories more engaging. For more social media insights, check out my unboring email newsletter.
