What Are Instagram Stories and How You Can use Them to Boost Engagement for Your Brand

There are currently over 500 million people creating and watching Instagram Stories on their mobile devices every day. And one in three people have said they become more interested in brands and products after seeing stories about those brands, featuring those products. In short, IG Stories boost your reach and engagement and, in some cases, influence purchasing behavior.

The Instagram Story feature was built to help brands share their individual stories and show their followers what makes them unique. Stories give followers a peek into what goes on behind the scenes—and followers love that.

Read on to find out more about Instagram Stories and how you can use this powerful feature to connect and engage with your target audience in an authentic way to build relationships that increase customer loyalty.

What is an Instagram Story?

An Instagram Story is a photo or video that automatically disappears within 24 hours. When you post a Story, a colorful ring around your profile picture appears, telling your followers they can tap on your profile photo to see what you’ve just posted. Your profile picture with the colorful ring around it also gets added to the top row of your followers’ home screens—making it the first thing they see.

IG stories are a perfect way for brands to experiment with different kinds of content because, unlike your permanent, curated feed, Stories disappear in 24 hours. Small business owners use their stories to post everything from unedited videos of their everyday lives to photos of their new products and short clips of them answering FAQs. Brands also use their Stories to show customer appreciation by re-sharing their followers’ stories and posts in their own Stories.

How to post a Story on Instagram

Now that you know what a Story is, it's time to get into how you can post your own. You can create and post a Story in three easy steps.

Step 1: Go to your home page and swipe left from any point on the screen to open the Instagram camera application. You can also get to the Instagram camera by tapping the “plus” button found at the bottom middle portion of your screen and then tapping “story.”

Step 2: Within the camera application, you can choose to either create brand new content for your story by tapping the white circle at the bottom middle portion of the screen or uploadphoto or video content you’ve previously created by tapping the album icon on the lower left portion of your screen. If you choose to upload an existing photo, take note that Instagram Story dimensions are 1080px by 1920 px. If you choose to create new content on the spot, you can create different types of stories:

Standard. A regular photo or video.
Text Create. A photo with text on a solid background. Accounts usually use Text Stories to pose a question, tell a story, or create mini-blogs within their Instagram Stories.
Boomerang. A really short video that plays forward and backward on a loop.
Layout. A collage of different photos.
Photobooth. Four continuous shots that get stitched together into one Story.
Superzoom. A Story that slowly zooms in on the video’s subject.
Multi-capture. A Story made up of multiple photos taken in quick succession.
Level. A photo or video that’s perfectly level, according to Instagram, usually for Stories featuring landscapes and horizons.

Step 3: Once you’ve created your story, you can add stickers and filters to it, draw on it, add text to it, and more. You can even mention, or tag, people or engage your followers through polls, quizzes, and other fun features.

If you want to create Stories even faster, you can create your content ahead of time, in bulk, and schedule those stories with Buffer’s planning and scheduling application. Buffer's Story tools will show you what your story is going to look like when it's live and let you schedule it ahead of time.

What are IG Story Highlights?

Instagram Story Highlights are collections of Stories that you curate, located at the top of your profile in the form of tappable circles. They were introduced in 2017 as a way for users to keep their favorite or most relevant Stories around for more than 24 hours.

Story Highlights appear directly below your bio, so they are one of the first things your followers see when they get onto your profile. Brands have used their Highlights to present important information (e.g. restaurant menus, product lists, etc.) upfront. Highlights are also a great way to keep testimonials on your account—when you re-share customers’ Stories about how happy they are with your product, instead of letting those testimonials disappear, save them in a Highlight Bubble.

Alongside Highlights, Instagram also introduced the Story Archive. After your Story disappears from your profile, it is automatically stored in your Story Archive, which only you can access within your settings. From the Archive, you can save your expired Stories to your device, rewatch them, or add them to a Story Highlight.

To create an Instagram Highlight, you need to:

Go to your profile page by tapping your profile photo located at the lower right corner of your screen
Tap the “New” circle located right underneath your bio, to the left
Choose some Stories from your Archive and then tap the “Next” button on the top right corner of your screen
Give your Highlight a name
Optional: Edit your Highlight cover by either uploading a pre-made cover from your device’s album or selecting a different Story for your cover

Once you’re done, your Instagram Highlight will appear as a bubble on your profile. You can have as many Highlights as you like, and they will stay on your profile until you remove them. To edit or remove a Highlight, just tap and hold that Highlight on your profile.

Instagram Story Features that Boost Engagement

Instagram Stories are so powerful because they build loyalty and increase engagement through humanizing your brand. Your followers probably already love your brand—sharing true, relatable, or interesting stories through a series of Insta Stories will encourage them to keep coming back to your account and interacting with your content (which eventually leads to conversions).

Instagram has made it even for brands to harness the power of Stories and create even more engaging content with the following features:

Instagram Story Stickers

Instagram Story Stickers are cartoons, moving gifs, or text you can place over your Stories to make them more engaging and interactive. You can use Stickers to add some text to your videos to tell a story or add a poll to a photo of your new products to ask your followers which ones they're most excited about.

To add stickers to your story, take or upload a photo or video and then tap the Stickers button (a smiley face in the top right of the screen) to find customizable stickers for weather, the current time, location, and more. You can move Stickers by dragging them across your screen and resizing them by pinching or expanding them with two fingers.

Instagram has also launched new types of stickers—like the Shop Sticker and Captions Sticker—to make it easier for Instagrammers with professional and business accounts to increase accessibility and engage their Story viewers. Here are some of our favorite stickers for small business owners:

Stories Captions Sticker

Instagram introduced the Stories Caption Sticker to increase the accessibility of their platform. Brands could add automated text captions to their stories by simply adding this sticker. It is currently only available in English-speaking countries, but Instagram plans to roll it out across different languages soon.

Shop Sticker

If you have Instagram Shopping set up for your business account, you can use the Shop Sticker to add clickable product icons to your Story.

Support Small Businesses Sticker

The Support Small Businesses Sticker allows personal, professional, and business accounts to tag small businesses in their stories through a clickable icon that also shows a preview of the small business’s account.

Donation Sticker

The Donation Sticker is an interactive Sticker accounts use to encourage donation to a specific cause. People who tap the Donation Sticker can donate to the linked cause right within Instagram.

Quiz Sticker

The Quiz Sticker lets you add an interactive, multiple-choice-type question to your Stories so you can ask your followers fun questions and see which ones get the right answer.

Question Sticker

The Question Sticker has a blank that lets your followers answer a question you pose. It can help you gather some insights on what your customers love, what they're interested in, what they'd like to see, and more.

Poll Sticker

The Poll Sticker lets your followers choose between two options you can customize: yes or no, A or B, basketball or soccer, 😃or 😭.

Some other fun stickers you can use are:

Hashtag Sticker
Location Sticker
Time and/or Weather Sticker
Music Sticker
Gif Sticker
Mention Sticker

The Instagram Swipe Up Link

The Instagram Swipe Up Link is a feature that allows you to add links to your stories—the only other place on your IG profile you can add links to is your profile bio. But there's a catch: you need to have 10,000 followers or more to gain access to the Swipe Up Link feature.

The Swipe Up Link reduces friction through the buyer journey because it lets your followers tap through to your product within your Story itself instead of having to exit the Story, tap on your Link in Bio, then look for the specific story or product. If you don't have 10,000 followers yet, you can look into alternatives like the Buffer Shop Grid.

IG Stories Analytics

If your account is a professional or business account, you can access Instagram analytics. Your profile analytics and Stories analytics are different, but both contain important data that can help you create more of the content your followers love.

You can access your IG stories analytics by tapping the “seen by” icon on the lower left corner of your story post. From your analytics, you will see:

How many Instagrammers your Story has reached
How people interacted with your Story (i.e. tap next, finish the story, go back, tap a sticker, exit)
How many Instagram Story views you received
How many people followed you after viewing that Story

You can find out which pieces of content are the most engaging based on Instagram’s Story analytics. If you need more in-depth information, you can check out Buffer’s Story analytics dashboard.

A winning Instagram Story strategy for your business

Spontaneously creating Instagram Stories and sharing snippets of your life with your followers is a great way to build engagement and start learning about the feature, but to really grow with IG Stories, you need a solid strategy.

Here are a few tips to get you started.

1. Post between one to seven Stories each day

We conducted research into how people are engaging with Instagram stories and found that posting between one to seven stories is best for keeping a high completion rate (over 70 percent).

Completion rate is determined by calculating the number of times your Stories were watched from the first Story frame all the way to the last Story frame within the given 24-hour time period.

This means that if you post between one to seven stories, the chances are 70 percent of your audience will stick around until the end of your last post.

If you do want to post longer stories, the drop off isn’t too bad. You can still see completion rates above 50 percent for posts longer than 20 stories.

2. Post Stories consistently and at optimal times

Consistency is key to social media, and the Instagram algorithm agrees. Given that stories only last for 24 hours, you want to maximize the reach of that content by posting consistently, a couple of times a day, and creating those posts when your followers are active.

The best time to post will vary for every account based on its audience and when they are most active. To give you an idea of where to start, we studied the average completion rate of stories across the day.

As you can see, story completion rates are highest at 4-6am, 8-10am, 12-2pm and 8-10pm (Eastern Time). But keep in mind that your account has its own set of unique followers so only you can gauge, based on analytics, when you should post your Stories to get the best results.

3. Build 1:1 relationships with your audience

When social media first hit the mainstream, there was a lot of buzz and excitement about being able to talk directly with your favorite celebrities and brands. Stories give brands the chance to get back to the roots of social media and engage with their followers on a 1:1 basis.

For example, we see brands running Q&A sessions via Stories with people sending questions via Instagram Direct, or question stickers, and the brand answering them within their stories. Brands are also re-sharing their followers’ in-feed appreciation posts and stories to their own stories to show their followers they are listening and love the feedback.

4. Go Live on Instagram, Occasionally

Instagram Lives are a kind of Story that you film, as the name suggests, live. Your followers can passively watch your Live, interact with you in real-time through the chat, or request to join you so you can host the Live together.

Create Instagram Lives when you have a special announcement to make, want to host an event (e.g. a Q&A session or office hours), or want to connect with your audience on an even more personal level. When you start a Live session, your followers get notified, so more people watch and join your session.

5. Use Stories ads to boost reach, engagement, and conversions

When we used Instagram Stories ads to promote our blog posts, we found they outperformed our Facebook feed ads.

Our Instagram Stories ads cost just $0.06 per click!

(On Facebook, our feed ads usually cost around $0.30 – $0.60 per click.)

Since Stories ads are still relatively new, we think it’s a great time to get started and make the most of it. We’re thrilled to help you with this.

Stories ads appear full-screen on mobile devices and run in-between users’ Stories. Here are a few ads we’ve recently spotted on Instagram:

If you’ve never created Stories ads before, here’s a starter guide, including the ad specs and tips for creating ad creatives. All you need to get started is a Facebook ads account!