Move over Snapchat, Instagram wants a piece of your user’s content. By introducing the new Instagram Stories, Instagram is encouraging users to share more content on the platform but with a twist. These Stories appear on the top of your Instagram feed, separate from your regular photo/video feed, and vanish after 24 hours. With there being over 500 million Instagrammers across the globe, it is one of the bigger platforms used for brands trying to reach their audience. Implementing Instagram Stories into your businesses Instagram strategy is something you should consider for a couple of reasons.

What we’re already using Instagram for

Although over the last few years Instagram posting has declined, Snapchat has seen a boost of over 10 billion views per day. This may be the case, but brands have stayed true to Instagram, posting an average of 1 to 2 times per day, with the most active brands on the platform looking to engage with user-generated content and interacting with users on their own posts. Sharing Instagram posts to Facebook has also reaped its benefits for businesses as a study found that more engagement came from those posts compared to natively published images.

Why Instagram stories will be beneficial for brands

1. Takeovers - Many brands already utilize the idea of takeovers on Snapchat, with one of the most common ways being one brand taking over another’s account for a period of time and sharing content. It’s more likely than not that brands will carry these methods over to Instagram in hopes of attracting a larger audience.

2. Live, timely content - Live video content is already buzzing with Facebook’s recent introduction of the feature and the growth of Snapchat, and now Instagram is providing a feature for brands too. Not only is live video content great for engagement, Stories can be a new medium for brands to provide an interactive experience for their followers.

3. Growth of 1:1 communication - The buzz and excitement that comes from being able to talk directly to your favourite celebrities and brands still capture a global audience. Instagram Stories is now another platform that brands can use to run Q&A sessions with the use of Instagram Direct and Stories to answer the questions and the usage of Stories themselves as direct messages to followers.

4. Behind-the-scenes content - Instagram Stories will bring back the authenticity that the content on your Instagram feed once had before it became polished, pre-produced photos and video. Utilizing Stories to showcase your business behind the posts in your feeds. A perfect example of this could be our work with St. Catharines Chicken Wing Fest. This upcoming weekend, if we’re posting an Instagram post to your feed with delicious looking chicken wings, we could then go in depth with the Stories feature by going behind-the-scenes and showcasing which vendor made those delicious-looking wings.

Where does your business on Instagram go from here?

When new features such as Instagram Stories gets released to social media there’s always a bit of reluctance to accept it. Being an early-adopter of this feature will have its benefits as you can be the brand that users are starting to interact with in the early stages of this feature. Although this new feature may not be the most ideal for your brand strategy, there’s certainly some considerations that can be made before completely shutting the idea down. A Q&A session with your followers is never a bad idea, and showcasing what’s behind the brand can always help a customer better connect with you. If that doesn’t work, interacting with your customers’ stories can also be a good way to enhance your 1:1 communication on Instagram.

Keeping on top to the latest trends (which maintaining your daily social media posts) can cause quite the headache. Let us social media experts at Hughes & Co. do all the juggling on your brand's behalf. When you work with H&C Inc., you can rest assured knowing you're social media will be full of high-quality, engaging content on time, all the time, every time. Get the ball rolling by contacting Krystyn here.