Want to know how to use Instagram stories successfully for your handmade business in this video.
I'm going to share with you the lowdown everything you need to know
to get started with Instagram stories today.
Hi, my name is May and I help makers artists
and designers make a consistent income from selling their handmade products online.
Okay, let's start from the very beginning what our Instagram stories.
Everyone is Familiar with the Instagram feed right?
When you post to Instagram. These are the images that show up in your followers news feeds
and on your Instagram profile page.
I like to think of these images as like your portfolio.
It's where you should be putting your best
images because this is mostly how people will judge whether or not they should follow your account.
So if say your last nine posts have five images of a cat people probably aren't going to follow
you unless you're running a cat account or your cat.
Is super cute or different stories are a newish feature that was introduced in 2016
as a way of giving viewers more of what they want,
which is more content and video. You can post either an image
or a video as a story and your story disappears 24 hours after posting it
but you might be wondering why a creates so much content if it just goes away after 24 hours.
Well two reasons stories are a great tool
for increasing engagement and to you can use stories as highlights.
It's the secret trick for giving your stories Maximum Impact.
So let's hit these two points
and then I'll get into more tricks for making the most of your Instagram stories.
If you're new to stories and you want to view them there the circles
that appear at the top of your app The Ordering
of stories that appear is based on how often you engage with those people
and Content the reality is customers have gotten pretty bored
and desensitized to professional looking photos from accounts.
So instead right now people are looking for more authenticity from social media,
but it's kind of a balance people definitely still expect the professional photos,
but they want to see even more than that.
And that's where stories come
in because they disappear you don't have to worry so much about every photo being perfect.
You can post what you're doing
and give your followers the real behind-the-scenes look inside your business
and because stories are located outside of your feed right there at the top of the app,
you will find yourself in front of eyeballs,
which is super important. We all want more visibility on Instagram
and stories can help with that posting between one
and seven stories a day is considered ideal posting more than that is fine,
but you won't see the same engagement with your content.
So what are some ideas to post in your stories?
Here are some examples a picture of your shipping boxes piling up.
This is social proof that people love to see that you're making and shipping orders.
It gives you credibility and makes people want to shop from you
a behind-the-scenes photo at your studio.
It can even be a messy one. No one cares people actually like that.
In progress projects or products that might not be quite
ready for lunch and yet it gives people a sense that there along the ride for the journey surveys.
I'll tell you more about the fun features in a little bit
or just a quick video clip of you talking about something related to your business
while people want to see authenticity.
I do still recommend keeping your stories mostly about your business
and less about personal stuff
unless you're an influencer first
and a product business second
when people see your face
and your studio and Process they get to know you they get to trust you
and that this increases the trust in your brand
and makes them more likely to make a purchase from you want to know what else is amazing.
If a follower watches her stories, then the algorithm knows that they're interested in
what you're doing,
which means they'll see more of your posts as well.
So if nothing else stories are a great way to recapture
engagement with your followers feeds that you
fallen off of one more thing about a judgment stories don't allow visible
or public comments like regular posts,
but your followers can reply to your story right now the reply shows
up as a direct message in your inbox with all of your other messages.
So make sure that you're regularly checking your message requests and engaging with those replies.
If someone asks you a question about your product you want to be on it besides
replying increases your engagement score with the algorithm.
Anyway now, let's talk about highlights.
Highlights are the circles that appear above your most recent posts on your profile page.
These are stories that you choose to highlight
and put into categories these remain past the 24-hour expiration period
until you decide to remove them.
This is great because if you're creating amazing content you want people to see
it for more than 24 hours,
right? So you can create as many categories
as you want in your highlights
and the one that you've most recently added content to Is the one that will appear first,
I recommend creating about three to six highlights depending on
what kind of content you're creating to highlight a story simply watch your own story
and then tap on highlight which appears as a little heart in most versions of the app,
you will then choose which category you want the story to go into by default.
The cover image of the highlights is an image from the content inside the story.
However, if you're going for a super cohesive look you can use a set of icons.
That suit your brain and creative Market is my go-to source for cute icons.
There's so many options. You'll definitely find ones that will work for you.
Just be sure to keep the image flexible enough to suit your content like,
you know, you don't want to be making
for amazing categories and then never really add another category
or highlight just because you can't find the right icon for it.
All right. So what makes for good highlights here are a few
suggestions behind the scenes images product information.
And Fa Q's tutorials our blog content and customer photos,
which I'll talk more about next. I like to think of your highlights in the same way
as you think about your website homepage.
What do you want a new visitor to see?
What do they want to know before making a purchase?
What content would help them to choose you over your competitors highlights are
the place to show those things if you're enjoying this video
and if you're finding it helpful,
please hit the like button, maybe even subscribe if you want more.
Like this when you like or subscribe
or leave a comment it tells you to cut this was a good video
and it helps show it to more people on YouTube.
Now, I mention customer content.
This is also called user-generated content or ugc for short and this is a gold mine.
If you have a product that customers are posting about you
want to share this with your audience this
type of social proof will people showing that they like your product.
It's incredibly valuable in terms of helping other people.
gain, trust in your product
But here's the thing though not all your customers are going to take the perfect photo,
you know, they're not going to be amazing professional photos.
Some won't be great. But you know what stories don't care.
So go ahead and share those photos to your story to share go to a post where you are tagged
or mentioned in and click on the flying airplane icon next to the comment icon there.
You'll see the option to send two stories.
This will only be available at the person's account. Allows it.
And if you have enough posts of customer photos,
you can definitely turn these into a highlight.
It's like a testimonials page but for your Instagram profile now when you're composing your story,
you'll see lots of extra goodies. You can add to it and new ones come out all the time.
I'll cover just a few right now location and hashtags.
Did you know that if you add a location tag
or hashtag to our story then your story will show up in searches
for that location or Egg and of course,
you don't want to clutter your story with like 30 hashtags that
you might regularly use on a normal post.
But if you're posting something where a hashtag
or location like if you're at an event and that would be particularly relevant,
then don't overlook this feature. Then there's tagging you can also tag
other accounts in a story tagging builds engagement.
If you're not doing it in a weird way,
for example a good way to use tagging is if you're in a partnership with another shop
Business owner you can give them a little story love pulling
and voting you can add a poll to a story to get feedback from your followers.
And of course if they vote that's increasing their level of
Engagement which feeds into the algorithm
and how often you will appear at the front of the story line up a sliding scale a pole
and questions are all options for creating polls.
Now you can also post videos in your stories.
This is a great way to engage with your audience.
Give a behind-the-scenes tour of your studio
or tell your followers why your new product is something you're super excited about
Instagram allows you to post videos of up to 15 seconds to your story.
But if your video is longer than 15 seconds Instagram now automatically just
cuts your video up into separate 15 seconds Stories.
The story will automatically proceed to the next one.
So people will be able to See the video continuously as like one longer video people love video.
They're engaging with it so much more these days. So definitely consider using it in your stories.
So just like your regular posts. You can see analytics on your stories check in occasionally
and see what's working.
Which story got really good reach and then ask yourself.
How can I replicate that use these stats to help determine
what kinds of content to post in the future you want to do more of what's already working?
Well, well