Why you should be using Insta stories for your business

Instagram stories aren’t the newest feature on the platform, but it’s one of the most underrated! A lot of businesses are missing a great opportunity to add personality to their business, build community around their brand, and get their accounts in front of more eyes. Check out these reasons for why you should be using stories for your business account!

Add a personal aspect to your business

Just like the name suggests, social media is meant to be social! Many businesses feel the need to curate their feed to the point that it starts to look like one long commercial. It may feel like the right move, but we have to remind ourselves why people are on Instagram in the first place: to connect. Sories are  an incredible way to give your business a personality. Let people into the heart of your brand by sharing yourself, your employees, your customers, the day to day, the behind the scenes – anything that might not be “feed worthy”.

(Photo 1 cap: @lynqlife does a great job of getting the founders into their stories and showing practical ways to use their products!)

Get content out faster

Stories are the perfect way to get content out without spending hours curating everything. With a post on your feed, you might want to edit the photo, caption it, tag some accounts, select your hashtags. This process can easily take 15 minutes (maybe more!) for one picture to go up. Stories are intended to be the less perfect side of Instagram. People don’t watch them expecting everything to be perfect. You can snap a picture or film a 15 second clip and add a sticker or two to help your account get found – all in one minute!! In the time you’d post one piece of feed content, you can get 15 or 20 pieces of story content. This gives you 15 extra opportunities to be found by potential customers.

(pic 2 cap: @jusu_bar re-shares customer stories, one of the easiest way to produce content without really having to produce content!)

Connect directly with your audience

Unlike posts on your feed, stories give you a huge selection of ways to get your audience involved. Not only can they reply with a comment or a reaction, when you use specific stickers you give the viewers a handful of new ways to be a part of the excitement! Through polls, votes, questions and quizzes, you can have some fun with your followers and even get some feedback from them that might be helpful in making real-life business decisions!!

(pic 3 cap: @blondie.boutique let’s their Instagram followers give their opinions on items they are considering to put in their store. Fun for the audience, useful data for the company!

Be found through extra channels

When you use the features correctly, you get the chance to be seen by more than just your followers. There are different stickers that can be added to your story. Some of them are just for fun, but others can actually help people see your account. When you use hashtags, location tags, account tags and some of the cute stickers, Instagram will occasionally push out your story to the search page or the explore page because they can show them to the target audience. For example, you can add a location tag for a café and if someone is looking at that location on Instagram, they’ll be able to see your story and it could lead them to click through to your feed. If they find your feed interesting, you might just have a new follower who is actively interested in what you have to offer!!

(Pic 4 cap: @newsbobb has used a location tag, account tag and hashtag in this story – 3 extra opportunities to be seen by new accounts!)