Instagram Stories have become one of the hottest trends in social media, crushing its main competitor, Snapchat, with over 300 million daily active users (compared to Snapchat’s 173 million). Its interactive stickers, fun filters, and live broadcasting capabilities continue to keep audiences engaged and coming back for more. In fact, more than half of Instagram daily users watch Stories every day. With such a massive audience constantly looking for content, every video creator should be leveraging the power of Stories to expand their fan base and get more followers on Instagram.

Why You Should Incorporate Stories To Get More Followers On Instagram

Instagram Stories offer content creators a more interactive extension of their typical Instagram feed. Stories provide viewers a more authentic experience because the footage is often unscripted or raw, unlike the traditional feed, which can be edited or posed. For example, this year’s Most-viewed Instagram Stories user and YouTube sensation, Lele Pons, continually post Stories poking fun of her day-to-day life. She even beat out Instagram studs like Kim Kardashian and Ariana Grande for the top spot! Another benefit of Instagram Stories is that it is always evolving and enhancing its features. Every month, the social platform delivers an exciting new update. For example, this month they rolled out their newest feature, Stories Highlights, that allows users to save and highlight their Stories in a new horizontal bar across the top of your profile. Finally, many of Instagram Stories features, like polls, offer a unique and fun form of fan interaction that the normal Instagram feed does not provide.

Tips to Increase Your Followers Using Instagram Stories

Stories can be a fun way to get more followers on Instagram, however, if you want to use them effectively you will need strategy and creative content, along with these tips:

Dedicate yourself to post regularly– It’s important to stay engaged with your followers, even if you just post once a day. Your followers want to have a good idea of who they are following, this gives you the opportunity to show them.

Get creative with capture modes– Stories don’t have to be your average video or still image, take advantage of the different capture modes Instagram provides. These features will help you post frequently and offer your audience a more creative viewing experience. The capture modes can be accessed by swiping across the words at the bottom of the screen and include:

  • Live video– allows you to broadcast through the app while your followers are able to watch, comment, and like the video all at the same time
  • Boomerang– (one of our favorites!) loops your video into a 3 second GIF creating a quick and soundless video.
  • Rewind– will reverse your video.
  • Stop-motion– uses multiple pictures to create one seamless video.
  • Superzoom– this silly new effect automatically zooms in with dramatic music.

Explore filters and stickers– There are a variety of filters and effects embedded in the app that you can choose from. Face filters use augmented reality to apply fun effects to faces that it detects. Stickers allow you to add your location, day of the week, hashtags, polls, fun word texts, and emojis once you take your video or picture. Stickers are interactive, so once a viewer clicks on an active sticker, like geolocation, they will be directed to a page showing any related posts and stories to that location.
Get your story on the Explore page– The Explore page can be very influential to your profile’s success because it offers a personalized experience for each user. Even though there are more than 100 million people visiting this page, every user’s Explore page is different and based on their interests. Instagram will recommend images to a target audience based on what they have liked in the past. It’s important to note that your profile must be turned on to “public” in order to accomplish this. Once you post to Instagram Stories and a variety of users view it, your story can potentially be put on the Explore page of accounts that follow your followers.
Don’t forget the hashtags– An easy way to gain a larger audience for your Stories is with the hashtag sticker. By leveraging trending hashtags in your posts, your Stories will appear on a page with the top posts for that hashtag making it discoverable for more viewers to find. Using hashtags in your Stories is even more important because Instagram just made it possible for users to follow their favorite hashtags, similar to how they follow their favorite users. The new “hashtag profiles” appear in a user’s regular feed and in their Stories.

Stories are a fun innovative way to get more followers on Instagram. They are also a cool way to interact and show your personality. Make sure you follow us on Instagram and check out Vydia’s daily Instagram Stories for inspiration!