During this current era of social media marketing, engagement with audiences is the most important thing to keep track of. You don’t necessarily have to focus all your efforts on reach or views of activities. What’s more important is how your prospective audience takes action when they view your posts.

In this article, we will be sharing some of our key tactics that can help boost your content strategy regarding your Instagram stories. Try utilizing all or most of these tips for Instagram stories:

1.     Tell a Story

Firstly, the easiest method of improving the engagement of your Instagram stories is to be a good storyteller. Your stories should be among those that have a beginning, middle, and an end. We know it’s very simple to just throw up photos and most of us are guilty of doing the same. Instead, you need to bite the bullet and give your audience a lot more context to make the overall experience much better.

2.     Let Viewers Know That They Need to Keep the Sound On or Add Captions

A clever and simple method of increasing the engagement of your Instagram stories is adding captions to all your video stories. Let’s be quite honest here. Most among your audiences don’t even have their sound on when they browse through their Gram feeds. Instead of being a head that is muted in a video, go ahead and spend some time writing out your script so that the reach and response from your audience can be maximized.

3.     Use Stickers

The stickers you can use for your Instagram stories are a lot of fun, aren’t they? These stickers make your Instagram stories a lot more interactive and there are 2 types of stickers for you to utilize:

        i.            Question Stickers

Although a simple method of prompting your audience to answer questions is to say so in your stories, the question stickers have their own unique benefits. Whenever you repost submitted questions, the people who asked get notifications that they have received an answer – which means an automatic view of your story.

Go ahead and ask your audience specific questions from a particular subject. Ask them what they would like to see next from your business or what the biggest challenges they faced were.

     ii.            Poll Stickers

There may be very fewer people out there who are annoyed by polls. Use the poll stickers while posting your stories to get a clue of your audience’s preferences and let them in on the decisions of your business. This could be as simple as asking them about what the next flavor should be from your line of products or simply ask them for their general feedback.

A very cool thing you can do with stickers is to gain access to the complete list of people who answered your polls or questions. Once this list has been accessed, you are ready to send them direct messages within 24 hours of the story ending to take the conversation further.

        iii.            Other Types of Stickers

Question and poll stickers aren’t the only types of stickers that can improve the engagement strategy of your Instagram stories. You may even go ahead and use location stickers to ensure that your content comes up in relevant region searches. You even have the option to add hashtags to stories and get your content in front of more eyes.

With the help of stickers, you can give your content a more interactive flair or make it more attention-grabbing so that it can boost your content strategy.

1.     Use Prompts

Sometimes you have no option but to tell people what you need them to do. In the case of Instagram stories, you can go ahead and use relevant prompts to increase the overall time spent on them and retain viewership. The best way of doing so is to utilize multiple tile stories and here’s how to implement them:

Hold to Read

Try to add long text messages on your Instagram stories to prompt people to ‘hold and read’ your posts for the full content.

Tap for More

You also have the option to start your Instagram stories with tiles that ask questions and have an extra ‘Tap for More’ after the question. The next few tiles can then feature you answering questions with the help of relevant information and static images.

Get Ready To

A prompt called ‘Get Ready To’ helps in creating excitement and anticipation while helping you set the tone for what your customers can expect next. This can be ‘get ready to turn your screens horizontally’ or ‘get ready to turn your sound on’.

Hopefully, these tactics will help you boost your content strategy and spark engagement for your Instagram stories!