The 5-Ingredient Recipe to Creating a Kickass Instagram Story

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Instagram stories are a great way to add a human interest element to your brand or personal brand accounts. Now, keep in mind, Instagram isn’t for everyone. The audience that hangs out on this platform is typically between the ages of 25-34. If that’s your target market then you’re in the right place.

To further build connection with your audience and tell more of your brand’s story follow this short and sweet recipe.

Have the ingredients ready

It’s important to plan ahead. Although I do love authenticity and the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pantalones approach, it’s not for everyone. Think about how you’re going to tell a story in 10-second increments, making sure it has a beginning, middle, and end.

For example, if you’re a real estate agent and you’re looking to feature a property on your IG story. Here’s how I would plan it out.

  • Beginning — A professional image of the property with a screen-tapping call-to-action. A good example would be: “We’re live at [enter address], let’s take a quick tour.”
  • Middle — If the property has an amazing screened-in porch, expansive yard and finished basement  — you want to hit all these points in the middle of your story with a few posts. And remember to get to the point, your audience’s attention span is extremely short.
  • End — This could be you on camera (selfie style) wrapping up with a farewell message and be sure to thank your audience for joining you and invite them to check out the property by visiting your website or simply sticking around for the next home tour.

Mix it up

Instagram is a fun platform to use and to get creative! Take advantage of this. To keep your audience engaged mix up the type of content you produce. Combine photos with boomerangs (an IG feature), step-by-step photos, and selfie style interactions.

Decorate

Definitely, take some time to play around with the app. Instagram allows you to create content within the app. Some examples of the type of content you can produce directly in the app.

  • Writing techniques – From traditional type to the freehand of using the multiple brush tools, there is no wrong answer on how to stylize your text for your IG stories. However, we would caution against going too far from your visual brand identity.
  • Add-ons — These add-ons are like the sprinkles in your IG story. Simply tap the sticker icon in the upper left corner to uncover a variety of fun stickers, captions and location tags, and hashtags. Also, there’s a fun way to poll your audience in here as well. In our experience, adding the location tag (real estate agents take note) have tripled our story views.
  • Tagging – Instagram makes it easy to @ tag someone in your story. All you have to do is type it in with the “@” followed by the username and ta-da! This will create a link directly to that IG account once clicked.
  • Filters — This reflects the mood of your story. I suggest keeping this super consistent with your story. To change a filter all you have to do is swipe the screen.

How do you like to decorate your Instagram stories? stellapop-click-to-tweet

Bake

If you’re into baking everything at once, and we hear you! You can utilize apps like the free Adobe Spark to create your Instagram story imagery ahead of time. The best part? There’s a template within the app that is the perfect size and allows you to add animations to your stories. So be sure to check out this free application if you’re a planner.

Have leftovers

Save and repurpose! So you just launched your story and it looks amazing. Way to go! But the bad news? Instagram stories only live for 24 hours, so saving your story as a video makes it last forever and ever (amen). By saving your story you can post it on other social media channels to get more exposure for your time you spent creating it. Yum!

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