How to get more engagement on your Instagram stories

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As many producers will be aware, the prospect of getting attention from social media platforms such as Instagram is not an easy process. However, the “stories” feature is a tool that allows people to connect with their audience outside of the main news feed. In this article, we’re going to discuss some capabilities of Instagram stories, and how you can use them to boost your overall engagement on the platform.

First of all, a “story” is something that you share with your audience. It may be a moment in time, valuable information, or just a Q&A to discover more about your audience. Whatever you’re posting, it needs to be appealing towards the audience. Therefore, ask yourself if you believe they will want to engage. If the answer is no, it’s probably not worth posting. Instead, using the features developed by Instagram allow you to create interesting pieces of content based on your niche. That’s certainly much better than spamming your fanbase with your new song link.

One thing to take note of is the story. As it is essentially a sequence of content pieces, the storyline needs to flow efficiently. Similar to a book, there should be an introduction, main body, and a conclusion. For example, if you were documenting your day, you could have a video talking into the camera whilst in bed, eating breakfast, and then the main body (hopefully) being a production session for the majority of the day.

Next, you should be using a variety of content types to maintain the audience’s attention. The currently available options include photo, video, live, boomerang, focus, superzoom, rewind, and hands-free. This allows your story to be interesting, and certainly rather different from the majority of other accounts within your niche creating stories simply using photos.

Another tip is to be efficient with your caption lengths. If you’re uploading a video, the chances are high that the caption needs to be fairly short due to the audience paying more attention to what’s happening in the content. However, images are perfect for long captions as they allow you to contextualize the post. For example, if your studio sessions were very eventful, you could write a few paragraphs in the caption about the topic. As Instagram rewards accounts that make users stay on the platform for a longer time (so they see more ads), your average reach will steadily increase the more that this is done. Also, it’s worth engaging on your followers’ stories. If you’re regularly engaging with people that follow you, there’s a high chance that they’ll also be very keen on checking out your own stories and content in their news feed.

Finally, posting at different times throughout the day is extremely beneficial towards getting a lot of views on your Instagram. As your story is constantly going to the front of people’s feeds, they are more likely to click it and engage with your content. So instead of posting 10 clips within the space of a few minutes, it’s certainly worth spreading that out across the day. Increased viewership is based on the strength of your brand, and your ability to interact with the fan base on social media. By creating interesting and engaging content, it helps strengthen the relationship between you and your audience.