If you’re marketing your business on Instagram, you absolutely need to be intentional about your Instagram stories strategy. Stories are key to building real connections, developing that coveted “Know, Like, and Trust” factor, and creating more valuable 1-1 conversations that generate converting customers. But as you know, each Instagram story is only up for 24 hours max, so it’s essential that your audience is tuned in to your stories so you can get them invested in your stories and build those meaningful interactions. If you’re struggling with inconsistent story view counts or low engagement on your stories, here are my favorite ways to increase both of those:
Be consistent.
Consistency is so important. You need to get your audience into a rhythm of tuning into your Stories. This is especially important because the more your audience watches your Stories, the closer to the front your Story will appear in the Stories feed.
Create valuable content.
You want to make people want to watch your stories. Give them insights into how you do what you do or something else that gives value and improves their day or life just a little bit by watching your Stories.
Start with a bang.
When you have something important to share, it’s key to start with a bang by calling this out. (You can’t assume people will automatically go to the next story!) Two ways you can do this are to use your first story posts of the day to share your important announcement OR tease that you’ll be sharing something exciting later!
Get personal.
Show your audience who you really are: your values, your personality, and your highs and lows. Building the know, like, and trust factor with your audience is essential to driving sales, and being real with your community on your stories is a huge part of that. A strong Stories strategy is what separates you from your competition, and gets someone to buy from you instead of someone else.
Be active in the Stories feed.
Show Instagram you’re active and connect with your community by engaging with other Stories in your Stories feed. Bonus tip: scroll right all the way to the end of your stories feed to make sure you’re giving some love to those accounts you haven’t engaged with in a while.
Think about your viewers instead of yourself.
Instead of thinking about what you want to show, think about what your followers want to see and what provides them the most value or entertainment. A few ways to figure this out: taking note of which Stories get you the most DM replies, engagements on your polls, and which Stories people exit out of the least.
Tell a story.
This may sound obvious because it’s called Instagram Stories, but this is far too often overlooked. Instead of randomly popping in here and there with stories that don’t relate to each other, focus on making sure your stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end—just like a traditional story would! Two easy ways to do this: say good morning and good night, or tell the audience what you’ll be sharing about that day!
Get to the point.
It’s no secret that people have short attention spans these days, so when you take eight slides to explain something, it’s likely that you’re going to lose them. Cut the fluff, be concise and get to the point faster!
Make your stories visually interesting.
Again, people have short attention spans. Keep your followers interested by mixing up the visual elements: walk around while you’re recording, change the scene in between stories, add a fun filter, or show something new that you’re doing.
Use engagement stickers.
Engagement stickers are those fun question boxes, polls, quizzes, rating meters, and all those other fun features that you see in the stickers section. When users engage with these stickers, it signifies to the algorithm two things: first, that this is a good Story that should be pushed out to more people; second, that that particular user wants to see more of your Stories! Bonus tip: when people engage with your story by sharing a question, voting on a poll, etc., send a reply message to them to have a valuable 1-1 conversation and build that relationship!
Embrace new features.
Embracing all the most recent features that Instagram Stories offers will directly increase your story views.
My recent experiment with Layouts proved this to be true, but this absolutely applies to other new features like Multi-Capture, PhotoBooth, and SuperZoom.
I hope these tips are helpful to you! However, it’s important to recognize that your Story views and engagement will always fluctuate day-to-day and that’s totally normal.
If you do everything right and still happen to get less Story views than normal on a given day, it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with your content. It might mean something as simple as more of your followers are busier than usual!
When you look at any Instagram metric like story views, engagements, followers, and more, it’s important to notice trends over time rather than putting too much weight into a day or two’s numbers.