Instagram Stories!
Instagram Stories is a wonderful way to convey your own unique narrative or share your special upcoming event through a series of photos or videos on Instagram.
Your “Instagram Story” is time-dependent as it will only last on Instagram for 24 hours from the moment you post your story. After this period, it will disappear from your followers’ view forever.
However, you can personally save your “Instagram Stories” to repost for another day!
This post is only meant to give you a basic introduction to Instagram Stories, and to show you how you can use it as a powerful tool to drive greater engagement and to build a huge following.
How to Post Your Instagram Story
As an example, here is how my partner Felicia Lin posts her Instagram Story announcing her upcoming social media public workshop and seminar to her followers at the Science Industry and Business Library (SIBL) in New York City on June 19.
1st Slide:
2nd Slide:
3rd Slide:
4th Slide:
Each new photo “event” in the series offers unique customizations on your smartphone that will allow you to create, overlay, and combine a collage of your own images, Instagram stock photos, icons, emojis, and illustrations.
5th Slide:
Each slide can be set on a timer to allow you to properly pace each successive frame of your unfolding "story".
6th Slide:
7th Slide:
Not only this, with EACH frame you are not only limited to including a still photo, but each successive frame can be its own VIDEO....now just imagine how compelling your narrative can be!
Sharing Your Instagram Story
Whenever you have shared your Instagram story, Instagram indicates you have posted a story by displaying a “red circle” (or sometimes "pinkish-gold" circle) around your profile photo in a queue running horizontally across your profile view.
After the viewer has read the story, that "red circle" will disappear.
After looking around a bit, I found this profile "ViewsbyKlara", as you can see this highly popular Instagram story-teller from Hanover, Germany has posted several stories in succession over a period of several days.
Instagram also indicates you have shared an Instagram story to your followers by displaying the same “red circle” in a queue running horizontally across your follower’s feed.
For example, here while inside my Instagram feed you can see Felicia’s story posted as a “red circle” (or "pinkish-gold" circle) to the right of my 4 Seasons Design profile photo.
This is followed to her right by several other “pinkish-gold circles” from different Instagram users who all have posted their own Instagram stories within a 24 hour period.
Ladies and Gents, this concludes my introduction to Instagram Stories.
Note, I would certainly be open and very interested to the possibility of following up this introduction with a detailed training module of how to use Instagram Stories.
Provided there will be enough folks here who would be interested in the training.
Please let me know in your comments below.
This was only brief orientation about Instagram Stories, of how you can create several eye-catching and compelling story posts using it, and how you can harness its unlimited narrative power to drive up your engagement numbers and to build a huge Instagram following.
All within a 24 hour period!
I certainly hope you enjoyed this introduction.
As always, please feel free to make any comments.
Cheers,
Kaju
Recent Comments
64
Thanks Courtney, as an artist this is a great way to communicate creativity to your audience. I hope you will be inspired to use it to tell your own personal story.
I would be interested. I do use Instagram but probablly not to its full advantage. Don’t you have to have a certain number of followers to be able to do stories or am I mixing it up with something else ?
With Grace and Gratitude
Karen
Hi Karen, no you wouldn't need a certain number of followers, anyone can do this. Fortunately for us now "in the know", the majority of IG users are not utilizing it. They simply either aren't aware of it, or won't be bothered.
This offers us a great advantage if we learn to use Instagram Stories for making our narrative unique which will create greater engagement and increase our following.
Kaju
Yes it is a bit of work (and if this is not your thing, it can seem like a LOAD of work!), but there are lots of elements "to play with" on Instagram when creating these slides.
There is a considerable amount of creativity involved, but since not everyone is doing this, the rewards can be great.
Thanks for sharing Kaju, I've been using Instagram more since your recent posts and still trying to build up a decent following. This should certainly help, thank you.
Instagram Stories adds a new layer to your Instagram arsenal, and allows you to be very creative Kim.It takes a bit of work, but the rewards are great.
Anytime, Jenny. If you try this and need help. please let me know. I am always here.
Kaju
Interesting post Kaju, I have an instagram account, but not using it much and that may be to do with the fact that it needs to be used through a mobile, I'm not quite sure
Either way this was a very enjoyable post which made good reading
Thanks Dave, I certainly DO understand an aversion to using mobile for these activities, I have them still all just the same.
But I push myself through it, because I want to be able to have the skills, and to understand all forms of social media, and how they can increase our audiences and impact us as influencers.
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Thanks Kaju, it sure looks very interesting.
Very, very interesting Nick. I hope you use it.
Thanks so much again Nick:) I have a new You Tube channel where I'm producing great content.
Check out our great Tokyo story as well as my Efren Reyes match win video play by play:)
Send me your YT link and I will Subscribe. You can Subscribe to my channel here:)
http://bit.ly/2T21P2N
If you don't yet, I will happily return the favor when yours is up.:)