How Instagram Stories Can Help Increase Audience Reach

How can an Instagram feature which disappears after 24 hours can help increase your audience reach? How can you reach more people when your marketing content just lasts for a day? How will this initiative help introduce your business to new prospects?

“If the Instagram feed has become a place for only the most polished, pre-produced photos and video, then Stories could be a way to add some authenticity to the content that appears in the feed. With Stories, brands have a chance to take their followers on a journey and tell the story behind the posts in their feed. This technique could be used by brands of all sizes and industries too. Imagine seeing a brand new post from Nike featuring a well-known athlete pop up in your Instagram feed, and then being able to go behind the scenes with that athlete directly afterward or even see some exclusive footage of the shoot in their story,” says Ash Read on his recent post.

How Businesses Can Benefit From IG Stories

Instagram Stories is one of those channels that is equally attractive to both regular users and businesses. Whether it’s about sharing fun, lighthearted content, to drive sales traffic, or promote a marketing campaign; it offers fair exposure to your followers, plus a window to maximize this opportunity to increase reach, and eventually customer engagement.

Stories will most likely become an integral part of Instagram. Given that there is high willingness from users to engage and a format that demands user attention, it has:

• High engagement rate with 150 million daily users actively using it. About 15-25% of people who see a Story link will likely swipe up.
• No competition since it takes up a full mobile screen. You’ll have the viewer’s full attention without anything above or below your post to tempt them. And it plays continuously.

You can find more social marketing tips from the most recent Neovora blogs. Now let’s tackle how this feature can benefit your brand.

When Users Create UCG

Encourage viewers to create user-generated content (UGC), which they will share on their own profile, while adding your recommended hashtag. To achieve remarkable results from this strategy, the first Story should be a summary of what the users would like to see. Then share multiple examples of customer images with with your brand in it, while the last slide should contain a call-to-action (CTA) for user to share and create their own content, plus a reminder to attach your brand hashtag.

 

Hashtag Stickers Work

Recently, Instagram released two types of Stickers – hashtag stickers and location stickers. You will be needing a branded hashtag for your business to make this work. Including your brand hashtag in a Story sticker will help you achieve an increase in reach and brand awareness. It encourages viewers to share their own UGC with your branded hashtag.

Users can then click on the hashtag, see all the posts, including yours. That’s an extra boost to your content. When your Story gets featured in the discover section and users click on your hashtag, this will offer stronger introduction to your brand which could lead to them checking out more of your posts and a possible follow.

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