Jewelry ECOMM Tech

How To Use Instagram Stories August 13, 2020 (0 comments)

Instagram Stories lets Instagram accounts post photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours.

Since launching in August 2016, more than 500 million Instagrammers use stories daily. It's a fantastic way to spotlight your favorite pieces of jewelry to your customers.

Here are the basics of using stories, and how to use Stories to make your business stand out on Instagram.

Using Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories appear in a bar at the top of your feed. When there is something new to see, their profile photo will have a colorful ring around it. Since Stories are located at the top of the app, it's prime real estate for you to use to promote jewelry.

To view someone’s story, you simply need to tap on their profile photo to open up a full screen view of all the content they’ve posted in the last 24hrs.

To create a story on Instagram, you have to tap the camera icon at the top left-hand corner of the screen, or you can reveal the story camera by simply swiping left.

After you’ve recorded your video or taken a photo, you can add filters, stickers, and more to draw attention to your story.

Remember - people will see a preview of the story in their feed. Use great graphics and interesting stickers to grab their attention so they click to watch the full video.

Creating Your Stories Strategy

Here are a few ways to make your Instagram Stories are successful.

1. Posting Frequency

Buffer did some research into how people are engaging with Instagram stories and found that posting between one to seven stories is best for keeping a high completion rate (over 70 percent).

Buffer explains "Completion rate is determined by calculating the number of times your Stories were watched from the first Story frame all the way to the last Story frame within the given 24-hour time period.

This means that if you post between one to seven stories, the chances are 70 percent of your audience will stick around until the end of your last post."

2. Use hashtags, stickers, and more

Instagram gives you a variety of "stickers" you can apply to your video to spice it up. Here are some of our favorites:

Location Sticker - You can place a visual sticker to tag a location.

Poll Sticker - interactive poll sticker that lets you ask a question and see results from your friends and followers as they vote.

Hashtag Sticker - You can add a hashtag sticker to help others find you by category.

Countdown Sticker - Build excitement for a trunk show or product release with your followers using the countdown sticker.

3. Use Stories Ads

Instagram Stories consistently seem to outperform Facebook feed ads. Typically, clicks from Story Ads seem to run about 1/10th the cost of "traditional" Facebook in-feed ads!

Any smart marketer can see the benefit of this. The likely reason the costs per click are so much less is because these ads are showing when you know the user is engaged and watching.

Stories ads appear full-screen on mobile devices and run in-between users’ Stories. So, a user will watch a friend's story, then they'll see an ad before the next Story plays.

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Does your jewelry store/brand leverage Instagram stories? Let us know in the comments! What are some of your best pointers?