Instagram is growing as a social platform week by week, and to keep up with the latest social media industry apps, Instagram are constantly bringing out new features to keep users entertained and ways to share their content in more innovative and fun ways. Instagram stories originally stemmed from Snapchat, and it wasn’t long before the popularity of Instagram stories grew and they too were offering facial filters, text over images and videos, not to mention the ability to send videos to individuals or your entire following.
At first, Instagram stories were just an additional feature that were a little bit forgotten about. However, over the last 6 months the industry has seen the feature become one of the most utilised attributes of the app. Not only have Instagram added more details to stories than grid posts, such as GIFS, location, polls and hashtags, but brands are now able to use this aspect to track website clicks, views and ROI in terms of engagement and traffic, all for what is usually a cheaper price than a grid photo from an influencer.
We think Instagram stories have become a great tool to use, and brands should be looking to use stories much more when working with influencers on future campaigns, and here’s how:
Get to know your followers with live videos
With Instagram stories you have the choice to upload pre-recorded videos, or dare to be brave and ‘go live’ giving followers the opportunity to tune in and watch you – even getting to ask you questions on the spot with a messaging feature. This will give you a chance to get to know your followers and answer any questions they have directly about your brand.
Collaborate with influencers with an Instagram story takeover
This is a great way to work with influencers in a unique and genuine way – if you have an influencer in mind who you think is the perfect brand ambassador and who you’d trust to talk to your followers on a professional yet personal level, having them host their own Q&A on your channel is a hugely successful way to drive their followers to your channel, and give your followers an exclusive treat!
Find out what your followers reallywant to see with polls
We love this feature here at TBP HQ. Polls are a really reliable way to attain market research and cater to your followers requests (and all for free!)
Drive website traffic with ‘swipe ups’
We all know how frustrating it is that you still can’t ‘link’ to websites in captions on your Instagram feed. However, there are ways around this. As soon as you’re over the 10k follower benchmark, Instagram stories gives you the ‘’swipe up” option where viewers can easily access your website or chosen link, just by an easy swipe up on your story. This can be great for when you’ve got a new product out - you can even track the amount of ‘swipe up’s (by switching to an Instagram business account) so you know how many users are actually interested in viewing your content, brand and products.
If you’re looking to work with experts to ensure you get the most out of your influencer marketing campaigns, you can make use of The Blogger Programme’s platform by contacting us to create a free proposal along with suggested influencers for your brand.
