Steve Dotto here. How the heck are you doing this fine day? Me? I'm struggling to catch
up as I imagine you are struggling to catch up as well. What I'm struggling with today
is Instagram Stories which is ever so similar to SnapChat Stories as to be an identical
twin brother or sister. Now if you are interested in just seeing a demo on how Instagram Stories
works, I encourage you to leap forward in the video to the time code which I'm putting
up here and skip my introduction because I'm about to rant for just a few seconds if you
would be so kind as to humor me. Here’s what happening. SnapChat has grown
in popularity because of a couple of factors. First and foremost, SnapChat is a really interesting
tool that allows an intimate conversation, often in video, between two individuals. But
SnapChat also has a one-to-many functionality through something called SnapChat Stories
where you record a series of little either still shots or ten-second video clips, string
them together into some form of narrative. Now the cool thing is that it lasts for 24
hours. So it basically takes your day and encapsulates it and a lot of people share
some very valuable and insightful content in that day and a lot of people share a lot
of crap in that day. It depends on who you’re following. But SnapChat kind of holds very
near to their soul a few things. First of all, they don’t give the people that are
publishing content a lot of feedback on the people that are viewing the content. You can
see raw numbers of how many people are viewing you but you can’t really market to them.
You can’t talk to them any other way except through the SnapChat platform. So they kind
of close the community. The other thing SnapChat does is they make
it very difficult to use their application. Now they will probably deny it but if the
truth be known, it is a quirky application that it almost takes a serious commitment
to figure out and the people who do figure out SnapChat kind of lord it over the rest
of us because they’ve figured it out whereas the rest of us just kind of look at them quizzically.
And I believe that’s part of the appeal. There’s a certain elitism to SnapChat which
is says that I figured it out, you haven’t, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, you’re not as smart
as me. That’s my opinion. Enter Instagram. Now Instagram is now owned
by Facebook, which has never been shy at stealing other people’s best ideas. It’s part of
what Facebook is. Sometimes successfully, sometimes catastrophically. Having said that,
Instagram—now owned by Facebook—has been viewing the success of SnapChat with a wee
bit of jealousy and they’ve decided that they’re going to incorporate some of SnapChat’s
functionality into Instagram. Now normally when software companies do this, they try
and mask the fact that they’re basically ripping somebody else off but not so in this
particular case. Instagram might as well call this SnapGram because it is virtually identical
to the Stories in SnapChat. They’re little ten-second clips. Now what
happens is instead of viewing them in your main Instagram feed, you view them in your
Instagram homepage so there’s a slightly different place that you view these stories
and they’ve added I think a nice layer of making it easier to access. It’s not as
quirky, for lack of a better term, for either both posting and for viewing. Now because
I am okay in Instagram but I've got a good friend who is phenomenal in Instagram and
actually has been very successful in SnapChat as well, Sue B. Zimmerman, I'm going to get
Sue to jump on with us in just a few seconds and walk us through
Instagram Stories. See? It’s going to take us some time, isn’t it? So let’s do that
intro again. So today on DottoTech, Instagram Stories.
Sue B. Zimmerman, the Instagram expert, what in the world is going on with SnapChat and
Instagram Stories? Sue: Well Steve, all my dreams came true.
I now can do what I've been doing on SnapChat on Instagram and it’s pretty darn exciting.
Steve: Well, let’s dive into it right away and then we can talk a little bit about the
social networking aspects of it. But first of all, does everybody have access to Instagram
Stories in Instagram? Is it launched platform-wide right now?
Sue: I think it is. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have it as of now. We’re like
four days into the announcement but everyone that I have been talking to and seeing on
Instagram has the Stories now. Steve: Okay, so I'm taking a look at my Instagram
feed and I'm at my home button on Instagram. And I guess this new bar across the top of
our news feed, our Instagram feed, that’s where the Snap Stories live. Am I correct
it? Sue: Yes, that’s where your story lives
and all the stories of those that you’ve chosen to follow on Instagram who have active
stories going on. Steve: So right now whoever is publishing
stories in Instagram is going to appear here so there’s no curation on Instagram, which
kind of harkens back to Instagram’s style of doing things which is whoever you’re
following you’re going to get an unfettered feed from them.
Sue: Exactly. You see that rainbow ring around their face?
Steve: Yes. Sue: So you can access it like you just explained
in the home button but Steve, if you are scrolling through your newsfeed which is where all the
posts, the photos and the videos are that you follow and if you see that somebody has
a rainbow ring around their avatar, that means that they have an active Instagram Story.
So you can also click in right from an Instagram profile.
Steve: Now I'm a little bit confused because I just scrolled down and I'm on a post by
you where you posted the beach at Martha’s vineyard and the Instagram expert and I can’t
see in your profile there that you’ve got a halo. But if I tap on you, if I go into
this post itself—let me just go in—if I tap on you, yeah, if I tap on you and go
into your profile, I see the rainbow there. Sue: So the rainbow signifies a post that
was recently made that you haven’t viewed yet.
Steve: Okay, got it. Sue: So you probably viewed some of mine before
and I haven’t posted one recently. So every time a new post clip gets posted, it turns
that brighter rainbow ring. Steve: Yeah, got it.
Sue: Okay. Steve: So here’s one of the things that
I like most about this. Now I haven’t actually posted yet so you’re going to walk me through
that in a moment but as far a viewing other people’s content, I see right here, see
Ian, Anderson, Grey and then Jen and then Leslie and Sammy. We’ve got a series of
posts here. If I tap on any one of these, up comes their story and I find it’s a lot
easier to navigate through. So talk me through the process.
Sue: Sure. Steve: So I've got Ian’s story running right
now. Sue: So Ian’s story is running and if you
want to quickly run through it just like in SnapChat, you can tap it to go forward or
you can— Steve: And that jumps me to the next story
or to the next module— Sue: To the next clip. To the next clip.
Steve: —or chapter of his story. Okay. Sue: Exactly, to the next clip. And then if
you tap to the right, I mean if you swipe to the right, it will take you to the next
clip or if you swipe back to the left, you can go backwards.
Steve: Okay. Sue: Or Steve, you can do what I did when
I made dinner the other night, I just put my phone down and I turned on Instagram Stories
and it continuously takes you from one story to the next of all the people that you’re
following. Steve: Jen’s showing her dog and Ian’s
just talking but he’s got the wet head is not dead with Ian Anderson Grey right now.
Okay. So this is how we view and I like this. I find this a lot more intuitive than SnapChat.
And it’s not destructive, right? Like we can go back and we can view it again and we
can view it again. What’s the life cycle of these posts?
Sue: Same. It’s 24 hours and you can save your clip to your camera roll just like you
can on SnapChat. You can save your memories. What you can’t do in Instagram that you
can do in SnapChat is save your whole story. Steve: Okay.
Sue: So there’s no beginning or end. Each clip dissolves in 24 hours so there’s a
whole fear of missing out. Steve: Yeah. So they’ve got that instant,
that kind of you want to be part of the moment, which is nice.
Sue: Exactly. Steve: Now as far as integrating, as far as
interacting with the video, I'm watching Ian’s video here, if I want to send him a message,
I guess I just tap on the Send message. Now how does that message arrive to Ian?
Sue: In his Instagram Direct Message. So you can either send a text message or you could
send a video message back and Ian will see it in his DM box. So to access that, Steve,
you can tap on the Home button on the far left on the button and you’ll see that filing
cabinet at the top and if you have any notifications that have come into your Direct Message, you
will see that. Steve: Okay.
Sue: I currently—I don’t know if you can see this but I have a 2 at the top of mine
right here so that means that I have 2 new direct messages.
Steve: Yeah, I've just got my message box opened. So I'm going to your feed here, to
the Sue B. Zimmerman feed. And then I just saw a video of you and Cody—oh sorry, I'm
navigating my way through, I'm going back to you, Sue.
Sue: Okay. Steve: You can’t see it. Sue’s Golden
Rule playing right now. So the other thing that I can do as far as interacting is if
you see inappropriate content, I guess you could report it by hitting on the three dots,
right? Sue: Yes.
Steve: Now there’s no way for me to save your content to my camera roll, is there?
Sue: There is no way to save it. The other thing I want to mention, Steve, is that you
can hide certain people from seeing your story. So if you don’t want someone on Instagram
to be viewing what you’re showing publicly, you can hide certain accounts.
Steve: Oh okay, very cool. So let’s get now into the creating of an Instagram story
ourselves. So let me show you how you go about creating your own stories. Now the easiest
way is to just click on that little plus button at the very top. When you click there, you’re
brought into the Instagram camera which will allow you to record your video if it’s a
video clip you want to record. All you do is click on that little record button, that
little white button at the bottom and you have to click and hold it for the length of
time as you’re recording, a maximum of ten seconds. So by clicking and holding, you get
to record your interesting conversation up to ten seconds long and then when you release
the button, the video is ready for you to do some more with. So you see it replay for
you automatically. Now we can dress it up a little bit. We can
add text to it, which is awesome. Amazing stuff. And once you’ve done that, you can
position this text anywhere. There’s just the one font style but you can zoom it in
and out like this and you can also add colors. Now I like the pens. They’ve got neon pens
and regular colored pens and what you do is you select the color and you select something
that’s going to look awesome and then you can kind of paint. Now this is the neon one.
You can kind of paint in, around and behind. So I'm going to choose that color there and
I'm going to choose this color here to kind of paint behind a little bit. So you can see
that you can kind of create a nice, little, additional some kind of almost like some branding
or some nice commentary to it. By clicking on Done, that will save it.
There is one thing that we can do. By tapping on the screen and swiping to the right—oops,
I'm in the pen mode; sorry, let me undo that. There we go. Say done—we can add filters.
Now it’s not as advanced as the filters that you find as far as like replacing your
face with a dog’s tongue and that sort of that stuff as you’re going to find in SnapChat,
although you can save those videos to the camera roll and then import them if you choose,
but that will allow you to add some basic filters here using the filter tool. The other
thing you can do, once you click on the check mark then it uploads it. You can use the Download
button at any point to save this back to your camera roll.
You can also incorporate photos. Let me just take a photo. Boom! I took a photo. That’s
a terrible photo. Cancel that. Well, that’s a much better photo. You can also take photos
and you can upload those and if you want to take any photos that you’ve taken, if you’ve
taken a series of photos and you want to upload them, or videos, if you swipe down—cancel—if
you swipe down when you’re in the Record mode, that brings you into your camera roll.
You don’t have access to all of your photos, only any images or videos that you’ve taken
in the last 24 hours because they want this to be very instant and very kind of spontaneous.
So you don’t have access to your old images, just to your current ones. That’s how you
create content for your Instagram Story account. Once that’s all said and done, you can take
a look at your story. You can tap into your story. You can see it. If you decide that
you’re unhappy with anything at any point, which I would be unhappy with this, you can
delete the video. You can save it. You can share it as a post which will then go into
your main Instagram feed. But I'm going to delete that—there we go—just because it’s
really not all that— Sue: Steve, does this mean you’re going
to actually do Instagram now? Steve: No, don’t be ridiculous. I might
do a little bit more. I like this. So this is great, Sue. You’ve walked me through
it and I think we’ve covered the basic things so people can get started. But let’s talk
a little bit about the interaction and what you’re going to expect from this as far
as interacting with your community. So where is this going to sit as far as the social
networking firmament goes? Sue: Okay, so first of all I like what you
just said. Personally, I have had more engagement through Instagram stories than anything else
I've done, either on SnapChat or Instagram, in just three days. Also, I'm able to look
at my Insights and anyone who has an Instagram business account, you can look at your Insights
and when you look at your Insights on Instagram, last week I’ve had an impression of over
32,000, Steve. In this week, in just the three days since it’s launched, 65,000 impressions.
Steve: Now this could be the convention bump though. This is the beginning of people kind
of looking at it and starting it out. But you’ve spent a lot of time using SnapChat
for engagement. Is it going to be easier for you to engage your audience on Instagram using
Instagram Stories than it was doing the same narrative, the same content in SnapChat?
Sue: Yeah, so I've decided that I'm not going to completely abandon SnapChat. I'm just going
to be spending less time there. I’ll probably do three or four snaps because there are certainly
people there that are diehard SnapChatters. But on Instagram now I have strategies around
content to curate that will complement and add value to my Instagram feed and this is
really what I want to stress with anyone listening. It’s that you really need to make sure whatever
stories you’re creating that it’s cohesive with your business, your brand and your values
so that there’s not a disconnect because people will un-follow you on Instagram if
they’re not getting that warm and fuzzy vibe that they got on your feed to begin with,
the reason that they chose to follow you. So you really need to make sure that it’s
going to connect nicely and add value to your Instagram content.
Steve: Yeah. I mean we walked through how this media works. There’s a tremendous intimacy
to using Instagram Stories or using SnapChat Stories for that matter. People are watching
it on their phones, it’s in a very personal space and it is not broadcast in the same
way as say this YouTube video that we’re publishing right now is broadcast, which is
designed to be kind of a more sterilized atmosphere in YouTube being broadcast. There’s a tremendous
intimacy. You’re expecting people to respond and as you say, there is also a very short
timeframe that people can access it in. So it’s far more about interpersonal communications
than any sort of broadcast or any sort of publishing of content.
Sue: Exactly, Steve. Plus, the intimacy, this is the word that I really want to highlight,
the intimacy of being able to connect with your favorite businesses, people and brands,
you now have a channel to actually do that. Steve: So scale of 1 to 10, how hard is SnapChat
to learn? Sue: I think 9 ½ to 10 for most people.
Steve: Scale of 1 to 10, how hard is Instagram Stories to learn?
Sue: 2 to 3. Steve: There we go. Sue B. Zimmerman—that’s
all the time we have for today’s show. I hope that you found it valuable and you learned
a lot. And big thanks to Sue B. Zimmerman for all of her assistance. Now there are three
ways for you to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech. The first is please subscribe
to this channel and secondly subscribe to our newsletter. That way you hear about all
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I encourage you to drop by our Patreon page, take a look and determine exactly what perks
are available to supporters of DottoTech because those perks be awesome. Till next time, I’m
Steve Dotto. Have fun storming the castle!