Since Instagram’s initial release of the Stories feature five months ago, business owners have found many ways to use Stories, such as experimenting with different hashtags and content types, and tagging your followers directly. However, Instagram is now working on two new features that will open up new ways for using Stories for marketing: Insights and Ads. Even though these features are not fully rolled out yet, it is still a good idea to familiarize yourself with the information available. In this post we’ll go over these two upcoming features for Instagram Stories so that you can prepare to use them once they’re available.
Quick Instagram Stories Review
Instagram is a platform for showing, rather than telling, your audience what your business does and how you operate. Stories creates a separate channel on Instagram for you to foster more frequent and real time engagement with your followers, without compromising the quality of your main profile gallery.
Instagram Stories Insights
The Insights feature is already available to Instagram business profiles, but only for regular Instagram posts. The latest Instagram feature will support insights for Stories, enabling you to see how many people are actually interacting with your Stories rather than just scrolling past them.
With information on the reach, impressions, and exits for every Story that you post, you can identify exactly which Stories create the largest amount of engagement with your followers. This is useful for optimizing your Stories posts and making the most of your Stories Ads.
Instagram Stories Ads
Did we just say Stories Ads? Yep! In addition to Insights, Instagram will also be adding advertising capabilities to Stories. You may have already seen this feature in action, as it is currently available to a select few larger business accounts. However, Instagram Stories Ads will soon be available to any business account.
Stories Ads will open up a new way to advertise your small business on Instagram. Stories will make for full-screen and fully immersive advertisements, where users can swipe up and click on links to a website or profile. This feature will set Stories ads apart from typical Stories, which don’t currently support clickable links. With Stories Insights, businesses can optimize their Stories Ads for engagement and learn how to improve for future ads.
Although Stories Ads and Insights haven’t been released for all users yet, it’s not too early to start thinking about how you want to use this feature. With holidays like Easter and Mother’s Day quickly approaching, Instagram Ads can be a great outlet to provide links to your followers to direct them to special promotions or new pages on your website, so keep an eye out for this new update!
