In this guide, we are going to teach you how you can perfect your Instagram stories strategy — driven by key statistics — so that you can increase your overall viewership from your target audience. Not to mention, you don’t really need to be an Insta professional to make a killing through Instagram stories. All you’ll need is a good Instagram stories strategy to beat it.
Unfortunately, while many of us are familiar with Instagram Stories, we may not always know everything there is to know about how to use Stories for social media marketing. That’s why, if you are just getting started, or rather stuck, you’ll need to come up with a working Instagram stories strategy so you can drive more viewers to engage with your content.
Be that as it may, if you search online, there are numerous ways to track or check Instagram profile viewers that you can consider. But, which method is the most suitable for a beginner Instagrammer? Eventually, it’s so easy to see who viewed your Instagram video content on a story. And the same level of information isn’t accessible for video posts.
If you’re using Instagram, then you too can see the profile of any member — that’s why many are keenly interested to know who viewed their Insta profile and who their stalkers are. Not only that but on Instagram, today, almost all celebrities are connected with fans and are sharing their social life. So, it’s good to know how to check Instagram profile viewers as well.
As of today, Instagram is the most popular image and video-sharing social media website. But, it’s its amazing features that are the main reason for its popularity. And now, you all know that Instagram is a part of Facebook, and people do love it. That said, let’s learn a few things about how you can perfect your Instagram stories strategy to increase viewership.
The Topmost Impactful Instagram Stories Backed Statistics
The question is: Do you want to perfect your Instagram marketing campaign using the Stories feature? If your answer is yes, you must know how a great Instagram stories strategy backed by statistics can simplify your marketing process. Today, Instagram Stories is one of the platform’s most familiar and notable features, which disappears after 24 hours of posting.
However, there are nearly over 500 million users actively using Instagram Stories all over the world. It is an excellent outlet for businesses or marketers to promote the brand immediately using original images. The video length of Stories is up to 15 seconds, and more brands are taking advantage of this feature to the most.
In contrast, after posting Stories content, they prefer to buy Instagram story views to improve their online presence. However, if you are a marketer, you should clearly know what makes Instagram Stories more popular than ever. Here to help you, we have listed the fascinating facts about Instagram Stories.
Forthwith, do you still doubt that posting Instagram Stories is a worthy decision? If yes, we’ve got a great deal for you that clarifies your doubts. That said, there are some of the topmost impactful Instagram stories backed by statistics to note. In particular, so that you’ll know how solid it is to have a good Instagram stories strategy for your Instagram profile.
Consider the following backed-up statistics:
- Instagram Stories’ daily active users are nearly more than 500 million
- 86.6% of Instagram users are likely to share their favorite Insta Stories
- 70% of Instagram users are actively watching Stories
- 36% of businesses started using Instagram Stories to promote their products
- 25% of Millennials and Gen Z are using Instagram to discover new products or services
And now that we have the above statistics at hand, let’s try to simplify and elaborate on them much further down below.
#1: Over 500 million people use Instagram Stories daily
The studies stated that half a billion people use the Instagram Stories feature daily. As many people actively use this feature, it has become the most popular one. To say in point means that nearly 4 million marketers use Stories to promote their business.
This means we can clearly let you know that over 1 billion Stories are shared daily on the platform. So, by knowing this stat fine-tune your marketing strategy and best spotlight your brand in the best way.
#2: 86.6% of Instagram users are likely sharing Instagram Stories
Right now, Instagram is the most trending application all over the world. It’s because the platform helps users to create and share highly visualizing content. Even now, it beats the most popular platforms by engaging and immersing people in watching the content.
As per the statistics, all users are sharing Stories. You get to know that approximately 63.4% of Instagram users like to share normal posts and around 36.6% like watching Instagram Stories.
Pro Tip: As more users are watching and sharing Instagram stories. So to make your content stand out, utilize EarnViews and encourage more users to watch.
#3: 60% of Millennials watch or post on Instagram Stories
You would know that Instagram is the millennial platform that offers a new way for users to watch, create and share content. And, as per the stat, nearly more than 60% of millennials are using Instagram Stories. As it is a short video format of 15 seconds, it is the most attractive feature that provides real value.
#4: 36% of businesses started using Instagram Stories to promote their products
Today, most businesses have started using Instagram and its features the most to get the audience’s attention. As a business, you should know that over 36% of businesses use Instagram Stories to promote their products and instantly boost their brand’s reach.
Once you get a clear insight, you can smartly use this feature to quickly get a sneak peek at your product launch in a great way. At the same time, you would also wonder how many businesses are trying different strategies like influencer marketing.
#5: The time limit of best-performing story ads is 1.3 seconds
According to the statistics, the Instagram Story ad is the most impressive type that could engage users and drive more customers. The best-performing story ads are 1.3 seconds, and some are 2.8 seconds. The poorer performing ads are 4.1 seconds. If you want to share longer videos on Stories, no worries.
Sharing content in the Stories feature will break down the videos into shorter ones that interest the audience in watching till the end. In other words, it means Instagram helps to retain customers.
Pro Tip: If you get a clear perspective about this stat, create Story ads that well-perform and use EarnViews to improve the visibility.
#6: 70% of Gen Z view Instagram Stories
In this trending era, more Gen Z’s often utilize TikTok and Instagram. If you compare Instagram with TikTok, many Gen Z is on the TikTok platform. At the same time, get to know that on Instagram, 70% of users are Gen Z.
Therefore, by knowing this fact, make sure to create unique content that impresses youngsters. It means that you have to showcase your creative skills in the most effective way to engage them.
#7: In stories, 15% to 25% of users swipe the brand’s links
If you are a business, you will get surprised by reading these specific statistics. Including the brand’s link is a worthwhile strategy to make users take action. As the Stories feature is more notable, including links in the content will make users swipe the links to visit your site.
Considering this, make sure to add your brand’s link in Stories and interact and engage your potential customers well.
#8: On average, a business will share 10 Instagram Stories a month
Businesses that neglect using Stories are going to lose something. To stay in the competition, you have to share Instagram Stories frequently. To higher user engagement and improve the retention rate of your customers, it is suggested to share new posts daily.
Remember that 25% of top brands share stories and posts 16 times a month. This way, they interact with their customers and help you to acquire many new customers.
How To Quickly Create Instagram Stories:
- First, click the + icon within the Instagram app (next to the heart icon) to get started.
- Secondly, go ahead and choose an Instagram Story from the menu.
- And then, click on the camera if you want to take a photo or a video.
- Thereafter, hold the white circle down for a video or click once for a photo — to take a selfie, flip the camera.
- Alternatively, select the photo or video from your camera roll that you want to use in your Story.
- Lastly, you can add stickers, hashtags, and other interactive features to your Stories as well.
By the same token, to create an Instagram Stories Highlight, tap the “New” circle at the far left. From there, you can choose any stories from your archive, select a cover for your highlight and give it a name. Once you’re done, your highlight will appear as a circle on your profile that plays as a stand-alone story when someone taps it.
Keep in mind, that Instagram Stories Highlights stay on your profile until you remove them, and you can have as many highlights as you’d like. Just tap and hold that highlight on your profile to edit or remove a highlight. And now, having said that, let’s learn more about how to do things right and create that perfect Instagram stories strategy in your next plan.
How To Perfect Your Instagram Stories Strategy
Needless to say, Instagram Stories are a vital part of any marketing strategy. But, managing all the different types of content on Instagram can sometimes feel like an overwhelming, neverending task. For this and many other reasons, a tool such as Sked will eventually simplify your Instagram Stories by automating the whole process of scheduling posts for you.
Furthermore, all you have to do is upload your content and select a time, and Sked will automatically post it for you! No intervention is needed, whether it’s 2 am or 2 pm, Monday or Sunday – and no matter the time zone. That aside, like any new feature, Instagram Stories have continued to evolve. The basic premise (disappearing after 24 hours) remains the same.
Not forgetting, that there are several other new capabilities that have also been added along the way — the trend seems like it will not end any time soon. Overall, the one thing that remains constant is Stories are the most popular content format for authenticity. They’ve always been a way for Instagram users to peel back the layers, to reach greatness.
Resource Reference: Emberify | How Does Instagram Marketing Help Brands Scale Quickly?
Whereby, they go beyond the perfectly curated image and showcase something a bit more real. In fact, this is true of individuals as well as Instagram business profiles. Bearing in mind, 47% of users said Instagram Stories help them be more authentic in their communication with friends and family. For businesses, your Stories even matter in the grand scheme.
The wholesome grand arena of social media marketing — authenticity is why! Stories help your brand show a real side to you and connect with your audience in an authentic, vulnerable manner that they love. With that in mind, below are a few chops that you can integrate into your next Instagram stories strategy to increase your audience viewership rate at large.
1. Emphasize your visual identity
In the first place, we recommend that you think about what you want your brand to look like on Instagram Stories at large. Of course, this isn’t set in stone obviously (nothing ever is, in the social media world). However, consider whether you want your brand’s personality to be on Stories. For example, try to post real-time and raw behind-the-scenes content first.
Or rather, on the other hand, you may prefer a much more curated look, using premade templates to post Stories content. Be that as it may, it also good to spend some time considering how you’d like your storytelling to look on Instagram first. And then, thereafter, you can begin creating your Instagram Stories to suit this visual identity that you have in mind.
In addition to building authentic connections with your target audience, making Stories a critical part of your social media marketing strategy can also be helpful in a variety of ways. Including but not limited to reaching more people, interacting with users, driving traffic to your site, running ads, increasing engagement rate, and much more…
2. Try to post Instagram content consistently
Simply sharing one Story every other day and waiting around for Insta fame to arrive isn’t going to work. If you truly want to make Stories a key part of your marketing strategy, you will need to post consistently. This may sound pretty basic, but it’s one of the easiest ways to get more people to watch your Stories.
And, as we aforementioned, every time you post a Story you will appear at the top of a user’s Instagram feed, and therefore increase your chances of getting seen. Important to realize, as of writing this article, videos on Stories can be up to 15 seconds long. If you record or upload a video longer than 15 seconds, it will automatically be split into multiple stories.
Markedly, there have been reports the company is testing videos up to 60 seconds in length, but this is yet to be rolled out officially. Always remember, that Instagram story dimensions are 1080px by 1920px i.e. your image or video should be 1080 pixels wide and 1920 pixels in height — the aspect ratio for Stories is 9:16.
As such, you should keep these dimensions in mind when creating your content. If you upload an image or video that doesn’t fit within these dimensions, your content will be cropped or lose quality due to being too zoomed in.
3. Employ a user invite interaction (stickers + hashtags)
Instagram Stories already come built-in with lots of great interactive functionality like Stickers. To enumerate, Stickers are Instagram Stories features that allow users to create more engaging content within their Stories. After uploading your photo or video to Stories, tap the square smiley icon at the top to begin adding stickers to your Stories quickly and easily.
FYI, stickers can also be added to Instagram Reels for those who are just getting started. To really make Stories work for you, you should really make use of Stickers to invite interaction from your followers and increase engagement.
Below are some ideas that you can consider:
- Use poll stickers to conduct useful or completely random polls.
- Ask questions to get to know your followers better or you could even get them to ask you questions.
- Use GIFs to add a bit of fun.
- Invite followers to direct message you.
- Use product stickers to link to products and drive click-throughs to your website.
What about Hashtags? Well, as you probably already know, hashtags are a key tactic for successful Instagram marketing. They can be useful for Stories as well. After you tag your Stories with a hashtag sticker, you’ll be able to tap the tag to see a page that shows all photos and videos people have uploaded with that hashtag.
4. Schedule content and include a Call To Action (CTA)
To really take your Instagram Stories strategy to the next level you need to jump on the scheduling and automating bandwagon. Feeding the beast that is Instagram can become a full-time gig. That’s why using a scheduling tool to plan, organize and post content on your Instagram account can be a huge timesaver.
Instead of creating your Stories content one at a time, get into the habit of batching your content creation. Planning and creating a bunch of content in one sitting will actually save you much more time. In addition to saving time, it also helps you plan ahead and tell better stories with your content. Sked Social can help you schedule your stories (and other types).
Plus remember how we said consistency matters. Well, planning ahead and scheduling can definitely help you stick to a more consistent Story posting schedule as well. Similarly, including a clear Call To Action (CTA) in your Stories is yet another great way for your audience to know exactly what you want them to do after watching your Stories (let them DM you).
5. Utilize some user-generated content and highlights
Many brands don’t have the time or bandwidth to constantly create new content for Stories. That’s fine. Your followers are probably creating content about your brand that you could share with your Stories. People love to see other people like them featured on brand social media accounts so make use of your user-generated content if your followers are creating it.
Similarly, you can also make use of unique highlights in your Instagram stories strategy too. Meaning, that if you want to extend the shelf life of your 24-hour Stories, don’t forget to make use of highlights. Adding your Stories to highlights helps increase their visibility and further enhances their reach. Highlights are also great for saving content quite effectively.
And, as a result, this can be useful for your audience over and over. What’s more, if you create a great tutorial through a series of Stories, for example, the usefulness of it doesn’t have to disappear in 24 hours. On that note, to be in the limelight, try to save it to your highlights — you can then direct your followers to it whenever they need the information.
But, that’s not all! One thing is for sure, depending on your brand, you can use highlights in different ways. Suffice it to say, that it doesn’t just have to be tutorials. Realistically, some brands even use it to showcase and save new season products. While, in the same fashion, others may use it to curate frequently asked questions in their Instagram Marketing as well.
6. Make use of the Instagram analytics tool to measure your performance
Moving on, in Instagram’s own words, “with Stories, you can share photos and videos that disappear from your profile, Feed, and messages after 24 hours — not unless you add them to your profile as story highlights.” To make your Stories more fun and interactive, you can use fun features like stickers, hashtags, polls, gifs, link swipe-ups, music, and more.
You can also put filters to work to make your visuals pop in true Instagram fashion. And, while this format was initially made popular by Snapchat, this “new feature” quickly took on a life of its own, and Stories have gone on to become one of the most beloved features on the social media platform. The best thing is to make sure that you measure your insights.
In this case, when you use Stories for marketing on your Instagram account, you will also have access to Instagram analytics tools as well — that will allow you to analyze how your content marketing efforts are performing. Consequently, with Instagram Insights you can dive into the data and understand the performance of your Stories better.
More so, within 14 days of your Instagram content posting. While Instagram Insights are great, they can sometimes be limiting for brands looking for a bit more. That’s why you should heavily rely on a great analytics and performance tool to pull all your Instagram data into one centralized platform and deliver what you most need – insights! And they are many.
With such tools, you can quickly and easily see in-depth Story analytics — such as reach, impressions, completion rate, taps back/forward, replies, exits, and plenty much more!
Final Takeaway:
You probably know that Instagram Stories reaps your benefits by reading the above facts. But, as Instagram is still growing, it is best to create and share compelling Stories to spotlight your brand in the best way possible. At the same time, showcase your inventiveness to stay at the top in the competitor’s market landscape.
Finally, don’t forget Instagram Stories are ultimately about storytelling. When thinking about how to use Instagram Stories for marketing, remember to put storytelling first, and selling second. Ask yourself what story you want to tell about your brand through Stories and how you want to tell it. Perse, great storytelling cuts through all the mediocre content.
Resource Reference: Instagram Advertising Strategy | Brand Marketers Best Tools
Specifically, content that gets shared every day by various brands (big or small) online. This means, that if you want your target audience to engage and interact with you, you should try to use creative ways to tell your story to them — instead of doing the same old thing every other business is doing. It’s now your turn to rise up above all the ranks/standards!
That’s it! Everything that you needed to know about how you can perfect your next Instagram stories strategy so that you can woo more users to engage with your content. Whilst, increasing the overall viewership of your content in the long run. With that in mind, if you think that there is something else we need to add, please Get In Touch and let us know.
All in all, you are also welcome to share your additional thoughts, suggestions, recommendations, opinions, or even contribution questions (for FAQ Answers free) in our comments section. Until the next one, thanks for your time!
Thanks for such a great article…