How to Use Instagram Stories to Grow Your Business

Instagram Stories is probably social media’s best kept secret, and here is how you can use them to grow your business.

Most people think of Instagram as a platform where you just post beautiful photos. The truth is, the platform is extremely powerful to draw an audience in aka find your ideal client. The most powerful tool on the platform in 2020 is Instagram stories. If you don’t know how to use them yet, I will tell you How to use Instagram stories to grow your business.

Wether you’re a content creator, or business owner, instagram is where you want to be.

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How to use instagram stories to grow your business

Step 1 – Post stories

This step might seem silly, but a lot of people are still not using stories. Stories give you the option to post so much more and more often than on the regular feed. If you don’t want to “ruin” your feed with random content, post on stories. Have something you don’t want to share forever? Post on stories.

Want to see how your audience feels about X, Y or Z? Post on stories!

Basically, you can never go wrong with posting on stories, because matters come to worse, it will be gone in 24 hrs.

Step 2 – Use hashtags

I always tell my clients it’s this simple: if one photo on your feed allows you to post 30 hashtags, each story allows you the same…and you can post virtually infinite stories. Ok, so the stories are not infinite, but nobody ever posts that many.

Pro Tip: Speaking of this, you should stick to 6-12 stories per day so as not to overwhelm your audience.

Hashtags will help you increase your viewership and since you can use many of them on each 15 second story, you have a huge chance of actually being seen by many.

There’s only one sticker for hashtags but you can actually type as many as you’d like as well.

Step 3 – Use Geotags

Geotags lets you reach local audiences. It’s a phenomenal idea to rank your stories in the locations you’re visiting or where you live. It’s an easy one step process and you can either tag a business, a brand or a location.

Many times, smaller locations will repost your stories on their location story (redundant I know…) and this will get you some local customers/viewers and possibly followers.

Do you know who your ideal audience is? Master your NICHE in 3 easy steps!!

Step 4 – Use Stickers

There are trending stickers on the Stories daily. If you click on the smiley face on the stories page, and then on the searcher above everything a bunch of stickers will show up. These are the trending stickers for this day (or hour) and using them will make your content rank higher.

It’s a silly trick, but it’s fun to add stickers anyway, it makes your stories more interactive.

Step 5 – Use polls + questions

Your audience loves feeling like they’re part of your experience. By adding questions and polls, you ask them to engage and help you make decisions. It’s a great way to see what they think, what content they enjoy the most and even what content you should create next.

Beware of the open question sticker, as this has been getting increasingly more spammy. It is hard discerning what is spam and what isn’t, but after using it for a bit you’ll learn what is real interaction and what is a bot.

Read about the 7 most common instagram mistakes everyone is doing in 2020!!

Most Importantly

Have fun! Stories are unlike the feed in that they don’t need to be curated or very serious. They don’t have to be on brand, and you can use this as an opportunity to show your personality or brand’s personality. Audiences love stories as they are personal, give a glimpse of behind the scenes, and are fun to engage with.

Stories are a phenomenal tool for engaging, entertaining, educating and even selling!

Don’t forget, you don’t have to have curated content in your stories and it does not have to be “on brand” so feel free to show your true colors and be real with your audience.

Do you use stories as part of your current content strategy on instagram? If no, why not?

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