Instagram Stories Ideas For Business | Peak Into My Best Performing IG Stories
So my favorite part of Instagram are stories. I love posting stories, I love seeing more authentic content from other people's stories, and I think that the tools that you use to post these types of content are just more fun in general. However, as a business owner, it's hard to know what to post on your stories that's balancing the line of personal and authentic, but also showing off how professional you are in your business. So today I'm going to walk you through my best performing stories with my audience and it should give you some ideas of what you should be able to post for your business.
So first, the goal of Instagram stories are to one build trust. You want to be able to get to know your followers and have them get to know you in a way that's different than a regular feed post or reel because these types of content are less curated it is a more of behind the scenes type of content that most people won't be able to see otherwise. Having this authentic type of content will encourage people to follow you and get updates on your business and your life. Another goal of stories is also to be able to sell your products and services. As you're building trust and showing who you are and what your business stands for, people are naturally going to get to know know you more and therefore be more willing to actually buy from you. So stories are a great way to turn your followers into actual paying customers and clients.
So let's take a dive into my past stories and what made certain ones perform better than others. So if I go into Instagram and then click on the three bars at the top right hand corner of my own profile, I will be able to find the button that says insights and that will take you to the homepage of all of your analytics within Instagram. Something to note is at the top there is a time frame and you can change that from the last 7 days to the last two weeks the last month last 90 days you can even do a custom look back period if you want to look at a certain month that you previously were posting on. So what I like to do is I like to go back in the last either 30 days or 90 days depending on how much content you're creating to get a better sense of how your stories have been performing in a recent amount of time, and then if you can see at the bottom if you press 'see all' next to content you shared and then at the top you're going to want to switch 'all' to 'stories'. So as I scroll through mine, the best performing ones tend to have a lot of pictures. So sometimes I will do stories like collages or layered pictures on top of each other just to keep it more eye-catching and there's more things to look at so people tend to watch the story longer. I also see a lot of lists. There's certain days where I will post what I'm actually doing that day or accomplishing that day and I found that people find that pretty interesting because they like seeing what I'm up to. So I actually get a lot of responses from those stories asking how I got so much done that day or that they were at the same place as me, asking how it went with a client, so I think it's really fun to share kind of what you have going on in your own business so that people can either relate or ask questions. I also see a lot of the polls and sliding features on stories that do really well also and this is because you're actually engaging your audience. A lot of people go on stories and they want to engage with you and if you have a poll or a question sticker that gives them the perfect opportunity to do so. Cause you have to think back and why are you opening the Instagram app. Usually people open it to stay updated on the people they know but also to find connection. So if you're giving them opportunities to connect with you, odds are that they will. I also noticed that the ones that do really well have my face in it. Because your face is the most recognizable part of your business, I do recommend showing off as much as you can in your stories and your content in general. The great part about stories is that they do go away in 24 hours so if it's not like the best photo, no one cares. It's supposed to be very authentically you and informal so the more personality and realness you can throw in the photo, the better. And lastly, the things that do really well are are life updates and business updates. Like I kind of mentioned earlier, people really like knowing what's going on, what's new and how they can stay updated with you. So including a life update about what's recently going on or travel you've done or a business update about new services you're offering, people tend to like those as well a lot. I tend to post more photos than videos on my stories but that's because usually photos tend to do better for me but I've also heard of other accounts where videos do better on stories so make sure you try that out and test it for yourself.
When you're going to create a story for your business, let's break down the steps and what you're going to do. Every single story you post has to have relevancy. So if you're posting for your candle making business and you are posting about your dog on your story, you can totally do that, but there is a way to make it more relevant instead of just a photo of your dog. Maybe have your dog posing next to the candles you made or you can show the candles you made that were inspired from your dog. So if your dog is part of you and your brand and is very important to you, then find a way to kind of weave it in with your business to make it more relevant and memorable. Another example of relevancy is if you go on an international trip and and you're so excited about it you want to post all the photos on your business account, you can do that, however, try and weave in again, your business, by showing what you learned from businesses over there and how it will impact your business services or products when you come back home. So kind of making it from the perspective of your business will make your audience more interested in your travels and what you have to say about what you learned. So number two, I always recommend having your brand color in there. You always want to be as recognizable as possible in any of your content but especially stories because people do tap through them very quickly. I always make sure the text I'm using on my stories will have my brand colors or you can make sure that the photos you're taking or the backgrounds you're using are your brand colors as well. You don't need to do this for every story but I do recommend trying to do it as much as possible. The third thing all of your stories need are interaction. I do recommend posting your story every single workday, however if you're posting more than once per day you only need one of these interaction stories per day. And by interaction, I mean a story that urges someone to click something on your story. So that could be a poll sticker, question sticker, slider sticker, add yours sticker, link sticker, or an emoji sticker. The more interactions your stories have, the better they will perform. One of the most powerful interaction stickers is that question sticker. This one will prompt someone to answer a question that you have or answer a prompt that you have and this will give you a direct opportunity to reach out to them in their direct messages. This is taking someone from simply viewing your story to having a one-on-one conversation. And one-on-one conversations have a higher likelihood of actually becoming a sale, so I recommend following through with those question stickers and creating conversations in your direct messages. And the last thing every story needs to have is something that your audience is going to take from it. After the story that you post you want them to either know you more, trust you more, have some sort of update about you or your business, or more likely to actually buy from you. There's obviously a lot of fun different things you can do with your stories but as long as it has all four of those factors you should be good to go. And then one last tip: once you feel like you're completely done with your story, I always recommend adding one more thing. Whether it's your location, or a fun gif, or maybe a fun Emoji, adding just one more thing will make it more eye-catching and have more things for people to look at so that way they're on your story longer.
As far as actually creating your stories I usually just make them in the Instagram app. I know some people will go into canva to create stories but I like having them be on the spot and less planned out and also it's less work. So just go into Instagram, add your photos, add your videos, and then add on some fun effects, fonts, drawings, gifs, try and make it your own and you'll be surprised at how much fun it can be. These are some of the top three analytics I look for when I'm posting stories: link clicks, replies, and reach. And these are the top ones I posted recently that did really well. So for link clicks, I have a YouTube promo story and this is basically telling my audience that hey this video is ready to watch, and it got the highest amount of link clicks out of the rest of my stories recently. The next one is a life update if you couldn't tell that was when I was telling my audience that I got engaged. And this one had by far the most replies out of all my recent content. And then lastly on the right, is reach. And this post was just me saying something that was vulnerable and an unpopular opinion at the time and it happened to do really well and reach a lot of people. Obviously using a little Emoji sticker here helped. People like pressing those and engaging so make sure to keep these in mind when you're creating your own content, that the different types that you will be posting will actually correlate to the different analytics you should be seeing from each type of post.
That is all for today, thank you so much for reading. If you're struggling to come up with content ideas for your business, I do have a free 40 content ideas linked below this video that you can download today.
