5 Creative Instagram Story Ideas to Engage Your Followers
5 Creative Instagram Story Ideas to Engage Your Followers
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Instagram Stories are the absolute best way to connect with your audience. But… what should you share? When? How often? And how can you truly keep people engaged again and again so they not only watch once but continue to watch? That is the challenge! I’ve compiled 30 Instagram Story ideas to help you find what to post, when, plus give you the confidence to continue sharing and gaining more eyes on your stories.
Instagram users watch Stories 250 million times a day. WHOA. People are more engaged than ever before to watch stories, participate in the conversation, and even buy products from stories they watch.
Features such as “polls” and “swipe up” let the Instagrammer know exactly what’s working and what’s not. I know if 1,000 people swipe up to read my blog post versus 100. It plays a big role in understanding what my audience is truly interested in. For instance, I can just ASK them with polls. It’s a difficult challenge to continue to entertain people on Instagram. That’s why I’ve come up with some awesome Instagram story ideas to make life much easier.
1.Location. Location. Location.
It’s not an accident that this idea landed first.
Using location markers in your Stories is huge. All the accounts I’ve worked with getting around 50% more views. Combine that with relevant hashtags and you’ll be scooping in two times more views to your Stories.
More views = more followers.
Easy enough.
2. Ask a Question #polltime
Every once in awhile Instagram adds new features. A while back we got the option to do polls.
Obviously, Instagram wants to push new features and rewards better views and rankings for the accounts to help their new features to be accepted by the community.
Doing polls isn’t that new anymore, but it’s still an awesome way to get your audience to do something.
Getting someone to do something for you makes them like you more and increases the chance of them doing something more for you in the future (#psychology).
The key to doing polls is to ask simple questions with very easy answers.
For example, if you’re in fashion you could ask which shirt you should wear today.
Blue vs. Red
3. Encourage People to Message You
After the big algorithm changes in late 2017 more people have reached out to me about the declined engagement rate.
Now, Instagram is trying to serve content based on what you’d like to see.
If you open your feed, you’ll probably see content from accounts that you know and are heavily interacting with.
Having a direct message communication with someone is a very strong signal to Instagram. It tells them the person you’re talking with is your friend, not just a random account you used to follow back in 2016. Therefore, ask people to send you a message.
Increasing your engagement rate is one thing, but you should also be genuinely interested in having real relationships with your followers and customers.
That’s what social media should be about. Real relationships.
4. Show Your Mood
Not all days are alike.
Stories can be raw and human. Don’t always aim to be perfect.
When you’re in a hurry, just let your audience know what’s going on and why you aren’t sharing.
If you simply don’t feel like putting something cool together, it’s perfectly okay to say that.
On the other hand, this depends on your niche a little bit as well. In some cases, you might not want to come off as lazy and moody. For example from fitness coaches, I expect constant energy and motivation.
5. Swipe Up to Read Posts
The Swipe up feature in Instagram Stories is unfortunately available only to accounts with 10k+ followers. If you’re not quite there yet, I suggest checking out my guide “how to get more followers on Instagram” from HopperHQ blog.
The Swipe up feature is perfect for promoting your latest posts if you’re a blogger or an opinion leader. Of course, you can be creative and drive traffic to your product page, giveaways, etc. If you want to spice it up a notch, then hire a designer or editor to add some animation to the swipe up arrow. This will make it more prominent and increases the swipe rate.
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