Why Instagram Stories Are Vital For Your Brand’s Engagement

We all know just how powerful social media can be for brands, but how much do you really know about the ins and outs of Instagram for marketing your business? Are you posting frequently but never gaining new followers? Perhaps you’re making sure you always like followers’ posts back and reply to their comments but you’re not making any more sales? 

You might be ticking all of the boxes, but completely ignoring one that’s really important, and therefore you’re missing out on heightened engagement and bigger reach. 

We are talking about Instagram Stories!

The Stories feature came onto Instagram in 2016, and since then, the first thing most people do when opening the app is slide across the top of the screen to view everyone’s stories.

If you’re not utilising Instagram Stories, and the ever-changing algorithm isn’t favouring your account, your posts might be getting lost in the crowd and therefore you won’t be reaching the people you need to in order to have engagement and ultimately make sales.

By utilising the Instagram Stories feature, you’re not only able to make sure you’re popping up on follower’s feeds, but you can interact with followers and actually push people towards purchasing products.

Now that you know exactly why it’s so important that you use Instagram Stories, it’s time to show you some of the best ways you should use them, so you’re getting the most out of the feature!

6 Ways To Increase Engagement With Instagram Stories

Get Your Followers To Ask Questions.

The Questions feature on Instagram stories is a really awesome way to create relationships with your followers and really show some personality behind your brand. You can use the Questions sticker in a variety of ways, from opening the floor to your followers to ask questions about your new collection, to letting them ask questions to you, the founder of the brand.

When it comes to being good at marketing, one of the most important things is knowing what your customers actually want, and you can utilise the Questions sticker to find that out.

Run Polls.

The Polls sticker on Instagram stories is a great and incredibly simple way to get your followers to interact with you, and you can see their preferences. For example, as seen in the ASOS example, you can see which look/products followers prefer.

You can also use the Poll Sticker to see your followers’ answers to a specific question, if you’d like to ask them one - this can be really useful for market research!

Share Information With Your Followers.

Although your followers are able to see your products on your feed in photos that focus on aesthetics, they need information about your products. Whilst you might not want to add lots of information about your products to captions, you can use Stories to share information about products.

Give Behind The Scenes Footage.

Showing your followers behind the scenes footage allows them to see a different side to your brand and shows that you are in fact a real person and a real team puts a lot of work in to create the polished images they usually see.

If you have a new collection coming soon, showing behind the scenes footage lets followers see glimpses of the new products and builds suspense and hype for the upcoming launch.

Shared Tagged Posts.

When people tag your account in photos, whether it be them doing a shootout that includes your brand, a photo of them using a product of yours, or wearing one of your garments, you should always share that, as it not only shows appreciation, but it also shows other followers that you have support.

Of course, you might not want to post a photo on your feed every time you get tagged in something, so utilise Instagram Stories to share these posts. Bonus points if you tag the product too!

Advertise Your Products.

You can use Instagram Stories to direct followers straight to specific items to purchase. You can either do this by creating a swipe up link to the website product page (you have to have 10K followers for this feature to work), or you can add a product tag if you have Instagram Shopping set up.

Now that you understand why Instagram Stories are so important when it comes to boosting your brand’s engagement, and you have some of the best ideas of how to use them, get to it and engage with your community! If you’re interested in finding out how we could help contact us today.