You will need to retain your existing visitors as well as attract new ones towards your site in order to ensure that your business growth is steady and as desired. However, creating the best website may not be enough in this modern business world that is highly competitive. You will need to find better ways to gain more traffic and what better way there can be in social media other than Instagram to ensure that.
However, given the fact that there are over 800 million active users on this platform in a month, it is quite natural that you will find it a bit difficult to impress your users. You will need to be over and above your competitors for that matter.
It is not enough to select the best pictures only. You will have to make the best use of the free as well as paid tools and features that Instagram provides. One such feature is the Instagram Stories.
- Instagram Stories will typically allow the users to post pictures and short videos at a much higher frequency but at the same time prevent them from overposting or clogging up the main feed.
- The Instagram Stories generally feature more organic and less polished images of the products and videos that teach how to use the product or any other intuitive matter.
- Much similar to the Snapchat Stories, the Instagram Stories also disappears after 24 hours.
Instagram Stories are all about authenticity irrespective of the fact that these Stories can be a bit raw, unlike the Instagram feed that must essentially contain more polished photos that you post for the followers for Instagram. You can use this feature for different purposes including:
- To give an idea to the user what happens behind the scenes
- To show how your product is made
- To showcase the culture of your company
- To share a social concern
- To live events that your business attends or hosts and several other time-sensitive matters.
All these aspects will surely tinkle the emotional side of your users enabling you to humanize your content. This will help you to make a better, faster and long-lasting impression in the minds of your users. Therefore, incorporating Instagram Stories in your posts will prove to be the most cost effective and result driven action that you could probably take to increase the footfall on your website by making the best use of your Instagram followers.
Posting your Instagram Story
When it comes to posting the Instagram Stories, you will be provided with three options ideally. All these are simple and equally effective and depend on your preference as to which one you will choose. These options are:
- Tapping the camera icon in the upper left corner
- Tapping Your Story + above your feed button or
- Just swiping right to access the camera.
However, you will need to give extra emphasis on the camera settings that comes with an array of options that may be unknown to you. Here they are:
- Live: This setting captures and publishes live contents to your Instagram account for the followers to watch
- Type: This setting will create a text post
- Music: The type of This special setting will pair music clip as per your choice to the specific image or video
- Superzoom: This feature will add an animated zoom to the video
- Focus: Rightly termed, this setting will focus only on the central subject and blur the background
- Rewind: As it is very evident and implied by the term this setting will play the video on the reverse
- Hands-Free: This setting will save you from the pain to hold the record button while you capture a video.
Lastly, there is a thunderbolt and arrow icon that you will find in any ordinary phone camera that will control the flash and switch the camera view from front to forward facing respectively. There are also filters that you can access by swiping to the left or to the right to edit the images and also select and use the pen icon to add a doodle and choose a specific color.
When you use the camera perfectly and post the Instagram Stories just as the way you should, it will make you very easy to add a character to your content. You may also add several fun elements in your Stories if you want by using one of the many fun features that Instagram offers such as the Aa icon that will allow you to add text using your keyboard. There is another smile icon that will allow you to add several other elements including:
- Location
- Music
- GIF
- Poll and several more fun features.
When you post Instagram Stories, you are allowed to tag a different account in it. This is a very unique and great way to connect with your followers as well as with other businesses. When you want to tag someone all you have to do is type the “@” symbol and follow it by the username that you would like to mention. This will make the tag clickable by the viewers to visit the profile that you have tagged along with. If you are mentioned in someone else’s story you will receive a notification immediately.
Now that you are ready to publish you must save it by pressing Your Story + icon. If you want to publish it at a later stage you can save it to the camera roll as well.
To sum up
Instagram stories are very useful to increase web traffic. These Stories actually establishes a human connection with the users. Typically, these Stories appear at the top of your Instagram feed as well as all through your profile picture. You can see who all viewed your content by swiping up when you view your Story.
Instagram Stories are much similar to SnapChatthat has facial recognition and lenses or filters. However, Instagram Stories are better in performance due to its search capabilities that provide a better chance for your business to be discovered. This will result in more followers visiting your site thereby raising the traffic.
