Do you, want to create an Instagram Story to give a kick start or boost your business? Are you curious to know how Instagram Algorithms work?
Well! Here, you end up with a full guide which will help in every essential aspect for a successful Instagram Story for business. Now, the time has come for people to think about Instagram, and using Instagram stories for the purpose of business.
Instagram Stories are not just random stories developed for fun and adding creative stuff. These stories should be efficiently used for promoting a business brand, engaging people, grabbing their attention towards your brand. It is even helpful in impacting the sales for any e-commerce site.
WHAT IS AN INSTAGRAM STORY?
This is one of the features offered by Instagram, in which people can upload images, videos, gifs etc., that appears as a slideshow. This slideshow disappears 24 hours after the images get posted. You can even say that the Instagram story is a brand new and authentic way of grabbing customer attention. There is no denying that the regular feed is also very good and amazing for creating wonderful and long-lasting or authentic posts.
Stories create a feeling of togetherness and intimacy, the reason why people love Instagram stories. They bring in enormous results while you have some events going on, or some business functions s coming up. Taking a video of your viewers or behind the scenes or about the brand or the event going on is always a great idea. Showing these behind the scenes sneak-peeks always help to connect with your audience. This attaches the feel of importance to them and they feel distinct and enjoy the sense of exclusivity. The audience also get a chance to know who you are as a person, in your personal lives, apart from on-screen and projected images.
Why should we opt for Instagram stories to promote business?
This new feature of Instagram got updated last year in August. In fact, almost all the people using the Instagram, were shocked when they found this feature. How did Instagram efficiently copy it from SnapChat? This was the thought that first popped-up in everyone’s minds. Whereas, people were under the impression that it was just a trick to steal the market value of the SnapChat. Instagram made its presence felt in the market much more than the then prevailing SnapChat.
While looking at the above Statistic, we can sum up that Instagram is not just a copy of SnapChat. In fact, it is a much better version of SnapChat. This transient tool for posting photos, videos and gifs can be effectively used for any business purpose. It maintains the customer and brand relationship , ithout ruining the joy and enjoyment of people.
Instagram stories a wide opportunity that contains the themes and tools which never bore the people. The channels make it interesting both for business segment and the common users. It equally supports both the groups. You can use Instagram in myriad ways, for enjoyment, for its light-hearted content, or for any business purpose viz. branding of the business, e-commerce sales etc.. All this, and more, is being done with with the help of Instagram Stories.
How to use Instagram Story For Business?
You can get a lot of features in the Instagram story. These useful features, help compile your posts, and these enable you to generate the content in a hassle free manner in the editor. Not only, this you can upload the data that is present somewhere else too.
Steps to use Instagram Story:
- When you open your profile, click on the camera icon or the ‘+’ symbol present of the profile picture. It can be clearly seen, when seen in the option “Your Story”.
- You just have to tap the ‘+’ symbol, it will directly take you to your gallery. From here, you can share photos, videos, gifs – anything you want to share. You only have to choose it from the list of your gallery.
- It will even show an option of editing where you can choose different editing features.
- Post editing, you can post your story but here also you will get two options, one is public, which means you can showcase it to all the people. The other option is the private mode, which means your story can be shared with only a limited number of people whom you have selected.
This is much different from the profile picture or the pictures that you upload. It doesn’t have the standard Instagram box, where you can post the stories which are vertically shot. But in this, you can store miscellaneous images, videos or photos, but the mandate is it should be having 1080 pixels width and 1920 pixels height.
After this, in March 2018, Instagram updated its version and released in the market. With the new upgrade, one could pinch the mobile screen and resize the photos, videos etc according to one’s choice.
Keeping aside posting of photos and videos, there are a lot many features present in the Instagram.
Extra features of Instagram
- Typing Post: The posts that are typing based. While you can also give different backgrounds, that may be colourful or designed per your taste.
- Boomerang: These are looping videos which last for 1 second.
- Instagram Live: This is the live streaming on Instagram. It is the in-moment real-time streaming. Here, your viewers can comment on your posts instantaneously, when the streaming starts, and you can answer them in the videos. You can, later post the live stream as your story.
- Hands-free recording: Without having to hold the record button, you can record the video hands-free.
- Super Zoom: From far away ,you can zoom in easily on the focused object. There are various humourous filters which you can use like Paparazzi or Suprise.
- Focus: You can find one of the most required filters that is Portrait. Using this, you can take the picture in which the main picture gets focused and the rest of the picture stands blurred out. The subject focuses only on your face and nothing else.
- Rewind: This means playing everything in a backward motion.
Tools for Instagram content
Using these all options is very helpful in creating content that is not only catchy, but adds to the fun. There are some tools available on the online platform like Canva which helps in creating these wonderful cards for different social media platforms.
Source: Canva
There are a plethora of ready made templates to choose from. All you have to do is select a template of your choice and edit at your end. After editing, you can post it on Instagram. This serves as an introduction, or call to action or acts as a single slide in the story. All these features make the viewer feel exclusive and special. They look and feel unique.
You can wear your thinking hat and get as creative as you want in the Instagram Stories. You can even experiment a lot of things by using all these creative ideas in the Instagram story and bring life to your Instagram Campaign. Combine all the texts, pictures, videos, boomerang, doodles etc to attract people’s attention.
How do the Instagram Algorithm works?
Instagram had a huge hype during the early years of its release and during the Instagram story upgrading. After this, the hype of Instagram gradually decreased. The exposure, even in the Instagram Field has been decreasing. Statistics now say that only 10% of the people show interest in brand promotion using Instagram stories.
This condition is very frustrating as people are keen on viewing the posts uploaded by their family, friends, loved ones, celebrities etc. This badly impacts on the Business people, as their aim is to reach a lot of people. Just because of the reducing exposure, the business people are getting badly impacted.
As we all know on Instagram, the algorithm basically depends on engagement and we get that from the Likes, Shares, Comments, Direct Message, posting different things like Videos, pictures, Gifs etc. All those ways which help in interacting with the people and engaging the people on your Instagram page.
When the news of the New Instagram Algorithm came up, it said:
Order of the Videos and the photos in the Instagram Profile will depend on your likelihood. Like the interesting option will come up first. It will also check the connection with the person and the timeline of the post.
Below are some of the tips and tricks that will help in engaging people in the Instagram story.
POST MORE INSTAGRAM STORY
Posting Instagram stories is one way of engaging and grabbing the attention of people. Instagram Stories have dominated the 2018 digital strategy and has become a crucial part in a successful Instagram campaign building. It has more than 300 Million active users in Instagram and looks for good Instagram Story which is twice as popular as snapchat.
This Instagram Algorithm keeps changing with the time and creates an impact on user engagement. Whereas, a number of users spend their time on Instagram Stories, not checking the feeds. The algorithm checks all the details present in your account -all the interactions, Instagram stories, messages sent etc.
More the people interact with your Instagram stories, the more frequently the feeds will show up on the user’s profile.
At times, the Instagram Algorithm even rewards you for interacting with more number of people. Not only is it good to note that the posts with higher engagement get priority in Instagram, but also the fact that It checks everything and can even restrict the users based on their engagement with the people.
Year by year, the number people getting engaged in Instagram is increasing and it becomes very important for the businesses to stay on the top. Especially in the first hour of posting, it reaches the people, else the post visibility may gradually decrease.
FIND THE ACTIVE AUDIENCE AND THEIR ACTIVE TIME
Know the best time to post things, because that is when you will have a huge crowd on the platform. To overcome these things, there are a lot of tools available which will help you in the Instagram Marketing Campaign like iFluenz, Instabrand, AspireIQ
Source: Instabrand
Source: AspireIQ
Source: iFluenz
All these tools calculate the time and select the best time when the users are online. These indicate the right time to post something on the social media. These tools are very helpful.
Similar to Facebook, Instagram also checks the time that a user takes to interact with the people. Else, we can say, it calculates the time taken by the marketers to interact with the users. It determines the popularity of a brand by checking the time spent by a user in viewing a post.
ATTRACTIVE INSTAGRAM CAPTIONS ATTRACT PEOPLE
Having a great and attractive Instagram caption is what makes the people stay in your post and help you beat the Instagram Algorithm. If the cation that you give is more engaging, then there is a 100% chance that people will click on the more option.
That extra second which people spend on your post has the potential to break or make your Instagram Campaign successful, so it is always recommended to spend time on making of the Caption. The above-mentioned tools will also help in writing captions.
My suggestion is to use the human brain because it is more creative. Write the caption for the post. You can even write the captions manually before posting anything as it will save you time.
Instead of opting for Caption, you can even go for the Videos because people find it more interactive and connecting. And people spend a lot of time watching a Video.
Instagram Algorithm rates you on the basis of Hashtags used. This is important, because the hashtags play a crucial role in improving the people engagement. The Instagram algorithm always bears in mind the hashtag and gives more relevance to the hashtags.
Recently, Instagram has removed the hashtags following. Instead, it came up with another aspect in which,
People can mark your content or the hashtags that they don’t want to see in future. They will have an option that they can opt which says “Don’t show for this Hashtags”.
All this throws a challenge to the marketers and makes the work difficult. So, this indicates that the Instagram marketing should be carefully done.
IMPROVE INSTAGRAM STRATEGY
People caption more hashtags then just giving normal sentences. The tools mentioned above makes it easier for you. As it adds the Instagram posts all by itself and you just ave to add the scheduled Instagram post. Rest everything is taken care of by the bot. There are a lot of templates available with mostly used hashtags. Just select the hashtag that suit your content and post it.
These are the effective hashtags that should be according to the campaign you are running. We can even consider another example given below:
The hashtags should vary according to the campaigns used. Instagram rules keep on changing and the main aim of it is to improve the engagement for a certain post. Whereas, the Instagram Algorithm is present to check such things only.
Now Instagram is considering putting an end to the automated messages like the “Nice Pic” “great” “Very good” etc. All these feed come from an automated bot.
