Time flies for content marketers who spend their days outlining Instagram strategies, researching hashtags, and making content plans. New features debut almost every month and discerning trends is challenging. Keeping up with Reels, Guides, and Shop Tabs can altogether make your head spin. Yet, ye good ol’ Stories remain the one Instagram constant that (thankfully) never changes.
Released in 2016, Stories are now Instagram’s most popular feature. (Stories are also an example of a successful rip-off (sorry, Snap!), but that’s a story for another time.)
A half-billion people use Instagram Stories every day, with businesses creating one-third of the most viewed Stories. Naturally, Stories should not only remain but be a vital part of your overall Instagram strategy. In other words, you can’t ignore Stories.
1. Use Highlights to drive traffic (even if you have less than 10,000 followers)
When new users land on your Instagram profile, they may not yet know who you are. You’ve probably heard a million times before how important it is to have a great Insta bio that catches the eye, quickly explains what your business does, and convinces new visitors to click that follow button.
With the Highlights feature, the bio section is a place not only where you tell the brand story but a place to convert visitors.
Think of Highlights as a short promo trailer for your business, and it becomes a perfect opportunity to show what your brand is all about, give a sense of what your product offers, and generate direct traffic to your sales landing page.
Even if you have a small Instagram account with less than 10,000 followers, you can still generate traffic through Highlights.
Need an example? Here’s one from my employer, Cooler Future, a finance Instagram account (a sector considered hard to grow on the platform). To promote their referral campaign, they described the offer in their Highlights. Since they don’t have 10,000 followers to trigger the swipe-up feature, they encouraged the viewers to react with a simple clap emoji. In turn, their social media manager would send the campaign link to the clapper’s DM.
