Instagram Story Ideas to Build Your Following
Keeping your Instagram busy is a good way to build your following. An active account is more interesting than an inactive one. Plus, using Instagram to share all types of content with your audience in many forms is going to be much more interesting to them than if you shared only one type. Let’s look at some ideas that you can incorporate into your stories to build your following.
* Show a Day in the Life – A great use of Instagram stories is to take a day and show up a few different times of the day to share what you’re doing as it relates to your audience and your business. For example, if you are a business coach, you might want to share how you run your own business and team with others.
* Go Live – Take some time to go live each day even to share just one exciting tidbit of news. When you go live randomly, your audience will get notified if they signed up to be notified. They’ll pay more attention to you and will even be sad if they miss it live, but they’ll also watch the recording if you leave one.
* Don’t Forget Your Call to Action – When you do share a story, always remember to include a call to action. Your audience will not act (or only very rarely) if you don’t tell them what to do. Each time you make any content, you should know what you want the results to be after your audience views it. That will inform your CTA.
* Provide a Sneak Peek – Creating a new product or service? Provide a sneak peek about it. Trying out a new software you want to recommend? Do a story about it. The more reasons you can find to show up in stories, the better for your quest to find more followers.
* Conduct a Poll – Instagram allows you to conduct polls, which is a good way to find out what your audience is thinking. Keep polls short and sweet to avoid any confusion, since these polls aren’t very scientific. If you want accurate results, consider keeping choices limited.
* Trade Instagram Stories for a Day – If you have a colleague that serves a similar or same audience as you do, you can trade Instagrams for a day. You run their stories, and they run yours. This is a wonderful way to get cross-promotion and more followers.
* Count Down to Launch – If you have a launch or an event coming up, use Instagram stories to do a countdown for the launch. This is a fun way to get everyone excited about your new offer.
* Use Stickers and Special Effects – Instagram has ways for you to grab your audience’s attention; use them. Add special effects, use stickers, add great hashtags. Call out the right people. Make yourself known so that you can grab those followers who like you.
* Add User-Generated Content – Another way to add to your Instagram stories is through user-generated content. Case studies, recommendations, testimonials and more are all useful for creating content for your Instagram. User-generated content will grab attention like nothing else.
Instagram stories can build your following if you remember who you’re supposed to be adding value to, stay true to yourself and your brand, and keep in mind that you need to publish content on a regular basis. Plus, be sure to explore all the features of Instagram to ensure that you’re using it as fully as possible.
