Instagram Stories: How Businesses Can Make the Most of Stories

Do you want to create more engaging and effective Instagram stories?

Are you using all of the Instagram Stories features available to you?

To explore how you can use the latest Stories features, I interview Sue B. Zimmerman.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Sue B. Zimmerman, an Instagram expert who helps businesses and marketers take their Instagram marketing to the next level. She's the author of the Instagram Strategy Guide.

Sue explains how she uses Instagram Highlights to drive traffic to her website.

You'll discover how to enhance your Instagram stories with GIFs, location hashtag stickers, adjustable fonts, and more.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Instagram Stories
Instagram Highlights

Instagram Highlights are the best content from your stories, the clips you don't want to disappear. A story appears on your Instagram profile for only 24 hours, but a highlight lives forever unless you choose to delete it. On your Instagram profile, highlight reels are located below your bio and right above your feed.

In your highlight reels, include the story clips that get a lot of eyeballs and engagement, which indicate your best content. Also, you can strategically name and brand your highlight reels. With a limit of about 11-12 characters, you have to keep names short, which has the benefit of making the names easy to read.

Sue's Instagram profile has a few highlight reels. One, which is simply called Blog, features clips about her blog posts. After she shares a blog post through stories, driving traffic to her website, she can put the blog post clip from her story into her Blog highlight reel. Each highlight in this reel has an image and a note to swipe up, which takes you directly to the blog post. (Only business accounts with more than 10,000 followers have access to the swipe up feature.)

Other highlight reels on Sue's Instagram profile are The Social Sip (her Facebook Live show) and Free Guide, which links to her Instagram Strategy Guide. Also, in her introductory highlight reel, Sue explains who she is, why she does what she does, and the value she can offer. An introduction highlight reel is a great opportunity to show people the faces behind your brand.

Another example Sue gives is from an advertising agency with a great behind-the-scenes highlight reel. To name the highlight reel, the agency uses the acronym BTS. This agency also has reels for their team, events, tips, and office.

I ask Sue how the analytics for stories compare to those for highlights. Sue says her story numbers constantly go up. She gets 1,000 to 2,000 views per clip. Her highlights also go up, although not as fast. She's gotten 700 to 1,000 views on a highlight clip.

Sue says the best highlight reels are those that align the cover with the business and brand. You can change the cover, name, and image in the front of the highlight.

To brand the cover, hire a graphic designer or use a resource such as Canva to create a simple image that reflects your business branding. For instance, the highlight cover for Sue's live show is a microphone in her brand colors. You then add that image to a story that you save to your highlight reel and designate as your cover image. (Also, don't delete the image from your story; doing so deletes the image from your highlight, too.)

To size your image for your highlight reel cover, you can pinch or expand the image with your fingers.

Listen to the show to hear my idea for creating a highlight reel of Social Media Marketing World.

Instagram Live

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