5 Tips to Help Maximize Instagram Stories for Your Business

Instagram stories provide a unique opportunity to reach a large audience with engaging and timely content. If you’re still dipping your toe into the Instagram stories pool, check out these tips that will have you creating more engaging stories content in no time.

1. Consistency is key

When creating stories for your brand, remember that it’s a different audience to your personal Instagram profile. A key element to establishing, and maintaining connection with your followers is using a consistent presentation format, and that, in large part, comes down to having a go-to stories template for your content.

We recommend that brands have around four or five stories templates ready to go - then all you need to do is drop in new images and update the text and you're ready to post.

Extra Tip: Ensure that any templates you do adopt are consistent with the overall style of your brand

2. Stay on brand

Once you’ve created a branded template, using your brand colors, fonts and style across your designs is a must.

Instagram stories where created to be authentic, so if you feel that your brand’s font doesn’t quite suit the scene, decide on a secondary font option to be used just for stories.

Try these combinations:

• Pair handwritten fonts with bold angular fonts.
• Pair san-serif fonts with serif fonts.
• Pair chunky sans-serif fonts with light serif fonts.

3. Choosing images and elements

The images you use should refer to the story, so most of the time you'll be using your own, branded content - with the exception of “inspo” stories.

You should also look to add moving elements and engaging stickers. Polls and questions also generate great engagement, and add another aspect to your content.

Adding location and hashtag stickers can also help to expand your stories' reach, broadening your messaging to a wider audience, as your story will then be eligible to appear on the location or hashtag story, and in the 'Explore' tab.

Extra tip: Post time-sensitive information, like specials, limited edition products or stories-only offers, with a ‘swipe up’ link (for eligible accounts)

4. Story highlights are a must

Highlighting your stories is a useful way to get longevity on your story content.

Customizing your highlight cover images will also ensure your Instagram feed is on brand and visually appealing.

5. Optimum story frequency

Don’t be afraid to post more than one story per day, but do take the time to plan and design your story to keep people scrolling through.

You can see where viewers dropped off your story by looking at the story viewers on each frame.

Extra tip: We like to post no more than six parts to a story, but as always, every audience is different, so test and measure where your audience drops off during your stories.

Our top Instagram Stories tools

Finally, to help you optimize and maximize your Stories efforts, here are some of the top tools we've found for creating and posting our content.

Branded templates

• Over – Over is a free app which enables you to easily create templates, upload your own fonts and create a branded color palette.
• Story art – Story art is another free app which provides hundreds of pre-made templates - however it’s not as customizable as Over or unfold.

Editing your stories

• Unfold – An extremely customizable app which enables you to add elements as you wish. Simply drop in images and you’re done.
• Cut story – Wanting to upload a video over 15 seconds in length? The Cut Story app enables you to trim your videos down, so you can fit them all into a single story.

Bonus tip: Lastly, you can now crosspost your Instagram Story to Facebook story, which is another consideration to maximize your Stories reach