Snapchat and Instagram stories are quite popular these days, especially among the young social media users. No doubt this story feature is getting popularity and we must know how to effectively use stories on Instagram and Snapchat to make an impact. Although this feature isn’t limited to Snapchat and Instagram now as WhatsApp and Facebook have also added this feature and YouTube seems to be adding this anytime in the near future.
Instagram and Snapchat stories aren’t just about updating the friends and fans through videos and pictures that last 24 hours but it is also being used by the brands to market their products and giving real-time updates to the audience. You might have seen the stories of brands during the events when they publish stories and show the different sides of the parties and events.
How to Effectively Use Stories on Snapchat and Instagram
Here are a few tips on making stories on Snapchat and Instagram:
Make Stories with a Plan
You can’t randomly start capturing and posting 10-second or 15-seconds videos and expect people to understand what’s going on. If you follow social media influencers, they keep their audience and fans updated with whatever is happening, even prior to the main event or day. So the first thing is the awareness before the event and the second is the plan that you must have for making stories. You must be building up a story that leads to the main part, and then, as the day ends, your story starts to conclude with the day. A well-planned story is always better than the randomly posted videos or pictures in Snapchat or Instagram stories.
Capture Interesting Moments
You can’t make a whole bunch of videos clips of a boring press conference and expect people to like it. People would eventually skip watching your story if they don’t like your content. It’s extremely important to showcase interesting moments of the day. For example, if you’re at a movie premier and you waited for a celebrity to walk past you and the moment has come, besides building up the story that you want to see some celebrities up close, you should try capturing the exact moments when that celebrity walks past you and you can show your excitement during that moment. The point is that always try to make your stories interesting for the audience to watch.
Make Stories Consistently
If you want to utilize the stories at its best, then try to make stories on a regular basis. You can’t expect great results if you make stories once a month. When you start to upload stories on a regular basis, people start to expect the stories, and thus they show up more often. In other words, if you want to dominate or grow through your stories, make your Snaps or Instagram stories active 24/7; it means anytime a follower opens up the stories, your story must be there. It’s not that tough if you regularly make stories.
Make Your Stories Public
You must check the story settings both in Snapchat and Instagram to make sure that your stories are publicly available to watch. Most of the times, it’s limited to the friends or followers, and therefore, it doesn’t give you much reach; although you can block people so that they won’t see your stories. But when you’re trying to reach more people and building a larger audience, these things might not matter to you. If you’re new to the stories, always check the settings to make necessary changes so that your stories reach gets better.
Promote on Other Platforms
Promotion is necessary when it comes to social media and stories are no exception. Always promote your Snapchat and Instagram handles on and off the platforms. Cross promotion between Snapchat and Instagram is good, though, but try to use Twitter and Facebook to promote your Snapchat and Instagram as well. One of the best ways to promote your Snapchat and Instagram IDs is saving/downloading your stories and uploading on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube along with the handles mentioned in the story. Snapchat and Instagram provide us with the feature of saving/download the stories, which becomes handy in the promotion on other platforms.
Conclusion
So I guided you on effectively using the stories on Snapchat and Instagram. It’s okay if you haven’t used this feature so far. You can start off now as we always start from zero at some point.
The purpose of writing this guide on using stories on Snapchat and Instagram is that you get to know and understand what is becoming popular in social media. Facebook and WhatsApp are infiltrating the story features and you might see this option on other platforms too. I tried to share a few important aspects of making stories; I know there is a lot to share about stories which I might share with you in the future articles.
Let me know what you think about Instagram and Snapchat stories.
Would you start using stories after reading this article?
