- More and more people and by people
I mean consumers, customers, your future clients
are spending their time on Instagram stories.
This video is all about creating Instagram stories
for business.
I'm gonna show you how to set them up
so that people watch them and how to make sure
the most people see them possible.
All right, let's get into it.
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My name is Jerry Potter yes, it rhymes with a boy wizard.
And today we are all about creating Instagram stories
for business.
Now if you're not very familiar with Instagram stories,
I've linked to a very popular tutorial
about how to use them in the first place
in the description of this video.
When it comes to creating instant stories for business
there are three important points
that I want to cover today.
The first is making sure your stories are designed
to get engagement, because that's what's gonna help them
get seen by more people.
The second important thing today is gonna be about
how to turn your viewers into paying customers and clients.
And the last thing I want to share
is how to get more people to watch your Instagram stories,
even if they're not already following you.
So make sure to watch till the end for those tips.
So starting with engagement,
why is engagement so important to your stories?
Well, first of all, watching your story counts
as engagement, especially if they watch
all the way to the end without skipping parts.
But engagement is what tells Instagram
that it's a good story.
When you log into your Instagram app
and you see those circles of stories at the top,
the ones you're gonna see you're gonna be different
than everybody else and the ones you're gonna see
are gonna be based on a few factors one,
which is probably the most obvious,
it's gonna be the people that you engage with the most.
So that's one reason why engaging
with your brand is important,
but to the ones that get lots of engagement
and seem to be more popular
are also gonna get moved up the line.
So the first thing to do to get engagement is pretty simple,
give people a reason to engage.
Go into the Instagram stickers and you've got polls,
you've got questions, you've got all these different things
that you can use.
You can ask questions, you can ask people to DM you
that spur action from people.
And every time any one of your stories gets any engagement
or interaction at all, that's gonna help your stories
get seen by more people.
So just keep that in mind as you're going.
Second thing is a little bit more complex,
but simple enough if you spend some time figuring it out
in the first place, and that's that these are stories.
It's fine if you're just like, Hey guys, I'm at work today,
I'm holding no phone and my phone's right here.
Hey guys, I'm at work today I'm filming some videos,
that's fine if that's what you want to do.
No problem at all.
If you're busy, I get it.
But if you really want to take your stories
to the next level, tell a story.
Have a distinctive beginning, middle and end.
The beginning should have a hook for them.
Ask them a question, something that makes them go, hah!
You know what some of the most popular stories are
and some of the most popular blogs on YouTube are
is people opening a package.
I'm standing in front of my desk here.
Here is this letter I recently got
and it's actually a letter I wrote to myself
at a conference recently, and then they mail it to me,
I have no idea what's in this envelope.
When I open this, I'm gonna do it on Instagram stories.
And here's the beginning, middle and end.
The beginning will be me going,
I got this letter that I wrote to myself at a conference
a few months ago, and they just sent it to me,
and I'm scared of what's inside,
because I remember being scared to write it,
but I don't remember what I said.
Then the second part will be opening it up
and reading the letter and the third part will be
whatever my natural reaction is to conclusion,
like, was it scary?
Did I write something really vulnerable?
What was it?
So think about things that you can share that have a hook,
your beginning, a middle part, and then a resolution
that answers whatever you teased in that hook
that will keep people watching longer
and if you do it regularly, it'll become second nature.
Second important thing when creating Instagram stories
for business is making sure that it's set up
to actually turn your viewers into customers or clients.
So how do you do that?
Well, I'll tell you the answer is not to post a story
every day going, Hey, buy this, hire me
that will get people to stop watching your stories
and probably unfollow you super quick.
So that's not what you want to do.
It's hard to have a one size fits all way to do this
for businesses, but what I would start with is,
how does your business make money
either on or off social media?
And then reverse engineer that so that you can get there
using your Instagram stories.
So for example, in my group coaching membership,
Five Minutes Social Media Pro, a lot of people
become members after we exchange emails
or talking a Facebook group or something like that.
Usually, it's at least a quick conversation.
So in my business, I would do lots of Instagram stories
where I encourage people to send me a direct message
and they can be sending me a direct message about my dog,
and then we just kind of have a conversation
and if it makes sense, I might start talking to him
about social media marketing and then eventually they might
become a member of Five Minutes Social Media Pro.
This does not mean to DM spam your followers,
this is just to start conversations.
So that's the way it works for my business.
Let's say you sell a physical product,
you could have an Instagram story asking people
to vote between two products.
Which shirt do you like better the red shirt
or the blue shirt?
Then you can go through and you
can actually DM everybody who voted.
You could ask them, why did you like the red shirt
or the blue shirt?
And if they seemed genuinely interested,
you could send them the link to buy it
or more likely to convert a sale,
you could send them a link and a coupon code to say,
"Hey, if you want today only it's 20% off
or here's a coupon code just for you, Sarah 20% off."
Just use the coupon code Sarah.
So that's another way with your products,
you could convert your viewers into actual purchases.
Now this is really important, find the balance.
You can't just be asking your audience to buy in the DMS
all the time, or they will run away and stop following you
and maybe even block you or even report you to Instagram
for spamming if you're too aggressive.
But you just want to have some idea
in your overall Instagram Stories strategy of
how eventually some of those people, not all of them,
but some of them will become customers or clients.
And the last thing that's really important, obviously,
when you're creating Instagram stories for business
is to try and get your stories seen by
as many people as possible.
So we talked about having them engage
that gets them in front of more people,
but how do you get people who aren't even following you
to see your stories?
Well, three quick tricks.
First one, simply ask people to share your story.
Now, you can't do this every time or it seems spammy.
But occasionally you can say, hey, if this was helpful,
and you know somebody else that would benefit from it,
by all means, hit that little paper airplane
and share the story, send it to them in their DMS,
the more the merrier, I just want to help people.
Something along those lines.
Second thing to do is use a hashtag in your stories.
Now, these are a little tricky to track
but what you can do is if you use a hashtag
that you think people are browsing for stories,
go through and put it on one of your stories
and then if you have a three part story,
and the first one has 30 views, the second one has 49
and the third one has 30 or 29, you got middle one had
the hashtag, then you know that people actually saw it
because of that hashtag.
So it's a good way to see if you can find a hashtag
that you can use.
There is a limit on hashtags in stories
and the number is 10.
You can't use any more than 10 I usually don't use
more than one.
And finally, people browse stories
for popular locations all the time.
So tag your city if nothing else,
you're at a tourist spot tag that.
Those are all ways to get new people
to get eyes on your stories.
Alright, if that and social media in general feels
like a lot, it can be.
If you want to cut your social media workload in half
I've linked up to our very popular free guide six ways
to cut your social media workload in half,
you should see it on the screen right here.
The link is also in the description of this video.
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