- If you're wondering how to use Instagram stories,
that's a great thing, because the stories format
on both Instagram and Facebook
is exploding so fast right now.
In this video we'll run through how to get started
on Instagram stories,
as well as some best practices
to use for businesses.
Let's get into it.
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My name is Jerry Potter,
and today we are teaching how to use Instagram stories.
Instagram stories, by the way, is my favorite
out of all things social media.
By the end of this video you'll know
how to use Instagram stories,
you'll learn how to use it quickly
and do a great job on it, 'cause you'll know
all of the basic settings that we run through.
Plus even if you're already using Instagram stories,
when you post makes a difference, and we'll cover that
right after the tutorial.
So for anyone who's brand, brand new to stories,
what they are is they are vertical,
they are a series of photographs,
videos, and graphics,
and they automatically delete after 24 hours.
So at the top of my Instagram screen here
you can see all these little circles,
these are people's stories that they have posted.
So I can tap in one, this is actually mine,
and as you finish one screen, you can tap ahead
to go to the next one.
So that's kind of where they are.
So for you to post a story, stories are different
from the traditional Instagram feed,
which are the videos and pictures
that people normally post
that you're used to scrolling through.
So if you were to post something to your feed,
you'd tap that bottom middle plus sign there.
That's not what we're doing today.
Today we are posting a story.
So I can either swipe right or I can tap
the little camera in the upper right hand corner here,
and that takes me into the Instagram story,
and this is where you're going to create your stories.
Down at the bottom are all
the different options for starting,
and you can swipe through these.
So let's just go left to right.
First one is type, if you just wanna put words on a screen
you can do that.
With all text in Instagram stories
up here at the top you can tap these different options,
and it'll take you through different fonts.
Once you have your text, you can pinch and zoom
to move it around if you want.
The circle on the lower left, you can tap that
and change the background color.
And then some of the text options
actually have more choices, for example,
this one you see the box at the top with the A++,
I can type on that, and it actually adds a background.
Next over is music.
They have gotten deals with a lot of the record companies,
so almost any song you could think of is in here.
You can browse what's popular,
or different moods, or different genres,
and then you can search for something,
and you can add music to your story that way.
So doing it this way means you actually hear the music
as you're recording the story
if you wanted to, I don't know, sing along
or dance, or anything like that.
Next up is live, this is if you were
gonna go on Instagram live,
this is where you would do it.
After that is normal.
This is where you would probably record most things,
and we'll come back to that when we go through
all the different things you can do with a story.
A boomerang, a boomerang takes a series of photos
over the course of a couple of seconds
to create an animation, for example, here I'll do one.
So I picked up the mug and now it creates that animation.
With superzoom there's a bunch of different camera effects
where the camera zooms in and out,
sometimes to music that you can play with there.
Focus is kind of neat, basically what it does,
it works best with faces.
You see it says find a face there on the screen.
But what it'll do is it'll blur out the background,
which kind of gives your videos and pictures
a more cinematic look.
Rewind, whatever you record it will play back backward.
So this is fun for some action shots sometimes.
And hands free, basically if you don't
wanna hold the button down to record,
you can just tap it and it'll go
until you stop it again in hands free mode.
So those are all of your options.
I'm gonna go back to normal,
and if you just wanted to take picture,
you just tap the big button in the middle,
now you've got a photo.
If instead you wanted to do video,
you hold and it starts recording video.
It'll go up to 15 seconds for a clip.
It used to cut off after 15, but now it'll
just break it into 15 second chunks.
So once I'm done now you can see
the two different video clips at the bottom.
You can add different graphics and text to those.
Other settings at the bottom over here on the right,
this is if you wanna add a filter
to whatever you're filming before you do it.
The two arrows are to flip the camera around
to use the front-facing camera.
And then lastly, over here, this little box
basically goes to your camera roll,
and you can take a picture from your camera roll
and use that in your story.
So let me just grab a picture without much on it on here,
and we'll go through all the things that you can do to it.
So let's go across the top, all the way to the left,
you see that X?
That's if you don't want this,
and you wanna delete it and start over,
you can tap that.
Next up, the down arrow,
let's say you took a really cool video or picture
and you wanted to save it to your camera roll,
you can tap that so it'll automatically
save it to your camera roll.
After that these are different effects that you can add.
So you can do this now even after
you've shot a video or a picture.
After that is a link, if you wanna add a link
to your Instagram story,
if you have more than 10,000 followers,
you can add a link to anything you want,
otherwise you can only link to IGTV videos,
which is what I have there.
Next up, this little Post-it Note
with a smiley face on it I guess we'll call it,
this is where most of your stuff is.
So we'll go through these here really quick.
You can add a location to your Instagram story,
which is a great idea, because that will
help more people see your story
and get more exposure for your brand.
You can @mention another account,
you can add a hashtag, which people do search hashtags
and watch them on Instagram stories,
so I should tag this social media marketing,
and maybe somebody would see it,
because I added that.
Now that I have that there,
with a lot of these you can tap on 'em
and it'll change the way that it looks.
As you can see, I can drag it around the screen
with my thumb.
I can change the size of it by pinching and zooming,
and if I decided I didn't want it at all,
I can drag it down to the bottom here,
and see the little trash can,
drag it over the trash can, and it's gone.
Also in here are GIFs which are really fun,
these are animated GIFs.
You can search for something.
Let's type in Facebook and see what comes up.
There we go, so I tap on that,
I can put this into my picture, move it where I want,
again, pinch to zoom if I wanna change the sizes.
Music, this is where afterward
you can add music to your story.
Once you choose a song in the story,
you can also decide which part of the song will play.
So really neat to be able
to add commercial music to your story.
That's a clock if you wanna time stamp your story.
Polls are fun, tap on that you can ask a question,
you can type the question, then you can
change the answers to whatever you want.
Once that's there you can move it to wherever you want.
Then when people are watching your story,
they can tap on one of the answers to vote,
and then actually later you can go back
and you can see who voted for what,
and then as people watch your stories after they vote,
they'll see, oh, 87% of people voted I do,
or whatever the case might be.
I'm gonna go ahead and trash that
just so we have more room here,
'cause there's so many things now.
Questions, these are fun.
You can ask a question, people can answer your question,
and then you can take those and add them
to future parts of your story.
It really is a neat little tool.
Countdown, this is if you're counting down to an event,
you can put a name in and then a date and a time
if you wanna count down to something.
If you're counting down to something major,
then other people can actually share it to their story,
which is kinda cool.
This is sort of a different kind of poll,
this is where they can just vote with this slider,
and you can choose a different icon, ask a question.
This is the current temperature you can add
if you wanted to show how cold
or warm it is outside or whatever,
and like with all of these you can pinch
and zoom and move them around.
It's getting kinda crowded like a cable news station.
And then these are all just graphics that Instagram provides
that you can add to your stories.
And then down below that you'll find
all of your traditional emojis as well.
So there are lots of fun ways
that you can dress up your stories.
Next to that, this is if you have audio
on your story but you don't want it, you can mute it.
The next one is simply a pen.
You can draw.
Down here you can choose the colors
that you wanna choose.
And if you don't see the exact color that you want,
you can tap this little eyedropper on the lower left,
and you can choose a color, like I'm gonna
try and choose the color of my shirt.
Now I've got glasses that match my shirt, sort of.
So you can really get artistic.
Over here on the left you can choose the size of your brush,
so you can make it bigger or smaller,
and then up here at the top you can
go through different types of brushes,
including an eraser if I wanted to erase those glasses.
And then lastly over here is for text.
You can type in text, up here at the top
you can go through the different styles
or fonts if you will.
Some of them have more options,
like over here you can change the justification,
is it gonna be on the left, right, or middle,
you can tap this A with the two plus signs next to it,
and now you've got color behind it.
And you can change the color that's behind it
by tapping the colors, and that's really helpful.
You can do that for your brand colors,
or just because it's white on a white background
and you want it to show up.
So now I'm gonna make it pink.
If you don't like the way something looks,
you can actually swipe through different filters,
just like you can on regular Instagram posts.
And once you've got this the way that you want it,
down here you can click send to and send it
to specific friends, or family, or followers.
Close friends, you can have a specific group
of close friends that you send things to,
which I personally like,
'cause I use this for my business and myself.
So there's certain things I post
only so close friends could see,
or if you just wanna post it to your story for everybody,
you click your story there at the bottom,
and just like that, it gets added to your story.
Oh, one more thing, 'cause I get asked this all the time,
so you've added something to your story,
how do you add something else to your story?
Well, simply go back into the Instagram camera again,
create one more time,
and then add to your story at the bottom there,
and now you'll have another clip added to your story,
simple as that.
So a couple of tips as you're using
Instagram stories for your business,
one, post about the same thing more than once.
For example, if you were giving a tip,
you're a chef or a photographer,
and you have some tip that you like to share that's helpful.
You can share it once a month.
First of all, you'll be rerecording it,
so it'll look a little different anyway,
second of all, everything auto deletes after 24 hours,
so the majority of your audience
won't see it the first time.
They might catch it the second or the third time.
And the other tip I wanna mention before you get started
is when you post does make a difference.
Stories that have posted most recently
will show closest to the front of the line on Instagram,
combined with other things in the algorithm,
like who that viewer's friends
and people they engage with the most,
but the more recent your post,
the more likely it is to show toward the front.
The other thing to keep in mind
is everything auto deletes after 24 hours,
so if you are telling a story,
and you post the first part at noon,
the second part at 3:00, and the third part at 5:00,
well, by one pm the next day, the first part
has already been deleted,
and if that's when's somebody's watching,
they won't get it.
So if you do spread out kind of the same storyline,
put in a little thing like, hey,
in case you missed it earlier,
this is what happened, now I'm doing this.
Got questions about something I didn't cover,
let me know in the comments.
I read every single one of them.
And if you're wondering about Instagram in general,
and posting to the feed,
I've got a tutorial about that.
You can get that in the description of this video.
If you liked this, give it a like,
hit subscribe, thank you for supporting not only me,
but also my two tiny superheroes at home.