Instagram Stories Part Two

Hello! Happy October, the spookiest time of the year ?. This month I am following up on my first IG story blog from April with a quick (maybe) follow up with more tips on how to make stories and use them to help your account grow!

via GIPHY

Highlights
The biggest thing I wanted to touch on with this one is making story highlights. These are the circles you see on someone’s profile that can be batched into themes of old stories.

This is the only way you can keep your stories viewable after 24 hours (unless you share them again). Once your story is up there will be an “add to highlight” option in the bottom right corner that you can select. If you don’t have any made yet, it will ask you to name it and make a highlight cover (more on that later). You can have up to 100 stories in your highlight and can have as many highlights as you want (although after a bit of scrolling I’m certain people will stop caring about them). If you want to add multiple stories to a highlight or remove one, go to your profile page and hold down on the highlight circle to get a bunch of different options.

Highlight Covers
One of the ways to make your story highlights and your Instagram profile page stand out is to make highlight covers. I have done this for Physarum as you can see in the screenshot above but not yet for Whale Tales.

It is on my to do list, but you can definitely see how the uniformity makes the Physarum page look professional. Covers can be picked from the stories in your highlight or from an image in your photo album. To make uniform ones, I have used the highlight cover templates in Canva but they could be easily made in any graphic creation or photo editing software.

Hiding Tags
Stories are not (yet) repostable without taking a screenshot which isn’t very classy. If you want someone to be able to share your story, tagging their Instagram profiles is the best way to do it. If you are crediting someone in a photo (see most of Whale Tales Instagram stories!) it is good to just type them up and use the “@” or the “mention” sticker option. If you don’t want to clutter up your story, type up the tag and then take the eyedropper option and make the text the same colour as the background. People then won’t be able to see the tag, but it will still enable that person to share the story. Easy! You can also do this with hashtags or locations to increase your reach (apparently the hashtag, mention and locations stickers gets you more reach than just typing out them out, but you can do both). If you want someone to see the hashtag and click on it, obviously keep it visible.

Archive
If you have set up story archive in your settings (which I think is as easy as going to archive under your menu and allowing it) you can see all the stories you’ve ever posted and when. You can also see the analytics but not the viewer list (that goes away after 24 hours). I like to use this for stories I share more than once to a) not reshare them to often and b) see how they did and whether or not they should be shared again. You can also use this as a memories vault-sharing stories from this day last year (or any day). If you have archive turned on you can also see your Instagram posts from this day in past years, a great way to share content if you don’t have any handy.

So that’s the total sum of my knowledge so far. Like everything else in social media IG stories keep changing and what you can do with them differs between accounts. They are one of the best ways to have your content seen so start experimenting and get sharing!

via GIPHY

 

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