When it comes to managing an engaging profile on Instagram for your brand, there are all sorts of separate parts of the platform that need specialist attention to get the most out of them. This article outlines a quick hack to help you make your stories look more “on brand” when sharing your own posts and reposts from others to your story timeline.
Putting posts out on your Instagram grid helps people see different aspects of your brand in a permanent location. Stories help attract extra attention in the 24-hour period after posting. So why not use the power of both?
Sharing your new posts to your Stories helps you get more attention on Instagram
You can direct attention to a new post on your timeline by including it on your Story. Some people browse their feeds and scroll through grid posts on Instagram and others concentrate on engaging with Stories instead. So this hack gives you the best of both worlds by giving your grid posts some love on your Stories.
But that’s not all. It’s easy to quickly share grid posts onto Stories, but making them more visually appealing to catch the attention of your followers takes a little more effort. So this guide will show you how to make the most out of some of the features hidden in Instagram’s Story publishing tools.
How to make an engaging repost from your Instagram grid onto your Story
Here’s a step by step guide, with the illustration above to help you use this hack on your own Instagram account. Before you start, you will need to have made a Story-proportioned image in a high resolution to optimise the look of your story, so make sure you have a cache of these to hand for using.
- First, scroll to the post you want to share to your Story and click the ‘Share’ button and then select ‘Add Post To Your Story’
- Add some hashtags related to your post – Instagram are now recommending 5 to 7 hashtags rather than maxing out on using up all 30, so think about the hashtags that will serve you the best for your post. Adding these hashtags will help your Story come up for people following those topics on Instagram and so are an important component for getting your post more attention.
- If appropriate, you then need to tag in some accounts too. Doing this means that your Story will end up in their notifications. The tagging of their account will also enable them to reshare your Story onto their Story. This is really useful if you have a good set of ‘marketing arm’ organisations that will be happy to see these notifications in their own accounts – but please don’t spam random accounts and people in this way if you don’t already have a relationship, because that will just annoy them! It’s the perfect thing to do if you have a collaboration with someone else though.
- Next, click on the stickers button and scroll to the image sticker to access the images you have saved on your phone. Choose the one you want to overlay on top of the post and resize it so that it covers everything you have just added to your Story post so far.
- Add more stickers on top such as ‘new post’ or ‘new product’ stickers to capture the attention of your audience.
- If you have a shop, or can tag products, then do that too.
- You can see we also added an animated ‘click here’ sticker to encourage people to click the Story – this will bring up the option for people to click through to see the post that is sat behind the image. If you position the click sticker where you want people to click they can access other things in the background, like the tagged accounts and the hashtags. It is sometimes worth having a flashing click sticker like this on a ‘View Shop’ button to signpost people to take the action you want them to take.
- When you are done, click share!
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We hope that you found this hack useful. Take a look at the other social media help articles we’ve put together:
We’re sure there will be additions to this list, so maybe bookmark this page if you found it helpful.
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