Are you ready for some Instagram Stories tips that are guaranteed to increase your reach and engagement – straight from the experts at Instagram?

We tuned in to F8 Refresh, Facebook’s annual developer conference, to learn what’s to come in the world of social media marketing, especially for Instagram Stories.

We summarize the five most important tips from Winnie Ma, Partner Engineer at Facebook, to strategically grow on stories:

Top 5 Instagram Stories Tips to Boost Your Reach and Engagement 

Not only are Instagram Stories fun and creative, but they’re also one of the best ways to grow your engagement, build brand awareness, and even drive sales!

Here are the top Instagram Stories tips for growing your business – according to Instagram:

1. Define your business goals
2. Create branded content
3. Remember to incorporate product marketing
4. Use social competitions
5. Develop an influencer marketing strategy

Tip #1: Plan and Define Your Business Goals 

The very first step to creating a solid Instagram Stories strategy is to plan and define your business goals.

This will help guide your content and tailor your publishing strategy to focus on what’s most important for your business.

Here’s a couple of suggestions to help you start setting goals for your stories:

• Build Brand Awareness: This could be related to growing your followers and expanding your community.
• Improve Retention: Whether it’s a follower or customer retention, you may want to focus on how often your followers are coming back to your profile to engage with your content.
• Improve Engagement: This goal most likely applies to every brand on social, but having a target to improve your content engagement, through story views, sticker clicks, or swipe-up engagement, is a great place to start.

TIP: Don’t forget to track and measure baseline metrics before implementing a new strategy. This way you can quickly and easily see changes or improvements in your content performance and assess if your strategy is working. Instagram’s native stories analytics are only available for 30 days.

Tip #2: Create On-brand Stories Content 

Instagram Stories may disappear after 24 hours, but it’s still a good idea to keep them on-brand and aesthetically pleasing.

There are tons of easy-to-use and affordable design apps available that make designing Instagram Stories a piece of cake.

Storyluxe, Unfold and Over are brilliant apps for pre-designed Instagram Stories templates.

And if you’re looking to add a pop of motion to your content, StoryBoost and Mojo have a fantastic range of animated templates too.

Read More: 7 Instagram ad Mistakes You’re Making

Tip #3: Remember to Incorporate Product Marketing 

This step is often overlooked, but it’s key to educate your audience on your product offering or services.

And it doesn’t have to be just through Instagram Stories! Think about how your products feed into all your other marketing channels, like email marketing or blog content.

If you can direct people to learn more about your product, you’re naturally shifting your audience down the funnel in preparation to convert into a customer!

Tip #4: Leverage Social Contests 

According to Instagram, there are real engagement opportunities through hosting a social contest on Instagram.

And we’d tend to agree! When done right, an Instagram giveaway can really spread the word about your brand while giving back to your community.

Tip #5: Harness the Power of Influencer Marketing 

If you’ve ever considered using Instagram influencer marketing for your business, now is the time to start!

Adding Instagram influencer marketing into your overall strategy for Instagram can help to increase your brand awareness, grow your follower base, and drive major sales.

And when it comes to Instagram Stories, branded partnerships can bring a whole host of opportunities for your brand and products to be discovered by new audiences.

What’s important is that you find influencers who are aligned with your brand values, product offering and that their audience fits in with your target persona.

And there you have it — the top ways to give your stories engagement and reach an added boost, according to the experts at Instagram.

Consider using these tips as a springboard when building your Instagram Stories strategy.