How Can Instagram Stories Help You? Check out the explanation here

In this video you're going to learn want surround stories are and how you can use them to grow your business on and surround. So firstly let me show you where they show up on Instagram if you come to the home screen here you can see across the top I can see the stories for the cans that I'm following. Also if I come into this discovery tab I can see across the top some stories from some of the top accounts on Instagram that Instagram think I might be interested in. Also if I come in to the accounts that I'm following and I can see in their profile a small ring around their profile image and it's in here I can look at really the stories as well.

So those are kind of the three main places they pop up. And here's an interesting thing about stories. You can see that in here. There is actually a link where where I can send people off to a site and you can see that Gary Vaynerchuk here is really pre-selling his new book and that is a great way to use Torys and there is a caveat for that. You need to have over 10000 followers in order to be able to add a link like that but it is a very effective way to drive traffic. You can see there he's encouraging people to follow an account. He's encouraging people to listen to a podcast that he was on. And I think that brings us off to the store so I might just go back. But you can see inside these Instagram stories is quite a lot of call to action. Listen to the podcast follow his secant pre-buy my book and that is something you may not want to do on your normal posts that are going to appear on your account. Because the key thing about Instagram stories is that they are only viewable for 24 hours and that means that the the quality the content can be a little bit less.

So if you've content that you don't think you can put on your profile maybe even the the image quality or video quality is lower. You can put it in your stories because it's still content that's good. And because it's only available for 24 hours people expect it to be a little less polished than what you might normally find on. And the profile images or the feed underneath here so you can use it to sell or you can use it to publish lower quality images. You can use it to Deeb kind of behind the scenes stuff. So let's go to some of the top stories here. This is Peter the famous kind of singer. And you can see it's kind of behind the scenes look here and as well what you'll see is there's quite a few stories in in the one 24 hour slot. So this is him kind of behind the scenes. Why people like these stories is because it shows maybe people in action more as humans. It's not just a staged photo that's very polished and maybe photoshopped it lives. People doubt that more human connection with an individual or even for a company the people working in that company. What's going on behind the scenes. How did they manage things. What is their office looked like what their employees looked like. People are interested in those things. So you can see this is just kind of pretty natural stuff going on and people are interested in this as well. So the key thing to note is that Instagram stories are not essential. You don't have to use this feature on Instagram at all if you don't want to. If I come into some of the other accounts that I'm following here just as an example you can see Richard Branson.

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There's no ring around his profile image there. It doesn't look like he uses stories at all. Or maybe just not right now. Tim Ferriss doesn't look like there's any stories there either. And in fact only about 30 percent of Instagram users use Instagram stories. So that's the kind of interesting thing Instagram stories are essentially a social network within a social network about 250 million people. Do you use them but that's only about 30 percent of Instagram's total user base. So it is a new feature. And in fact Instagram just stole it from snapchat. It's an interesting back story actually that Mark Zuckerberg who owns Facebook who owns Instagram tried to buy Snapchat twice. And when they were rebuffed or refused they just decided to kind of steal the main feature of snapchat and put it into Instagram. And that has actually stopped a lot of people from setting up an Instagram account because the main differentiator then was available in an Instagram here. So that's kind of a little bit of the history of it. Now let me show you how to actually add a story for yourself on how to publish one. So what you can do is come into your profile here and you can see next to your profile image. There's a little plus button and what you can do is just take any video or picture or even look at your videos your images taken in the last 24 hours. You can only post videos and images in the last 24 hours. So what you can do is just select the image and there's a ton of features in here that make it that bit more casual like you can kind of right on top of images. I can then if I'm unhappy with that I can add that to my story. And you can see now and that is that circle across the top of my profile I can know if I want to throughout the day add more videos or images to my story what I can do is click on my story. Click on the plus image in the top right hand corner again. And for example I put out a video and there's all sorts of features in here superzoom rewind hands free stop motion a lot of quite creative features that can make it pretty interesting. So I'll just take a boomerang image here. See you can see and there you can see this kind of boomerang feature you've probably seen this before and really that's you set it up. So I'm happy with that then I can just add that to my story once again. And so throughout the day you can be adding these videos or images that kind of give up behind the scenes look if I come into my story once again. I can see that there's my kind of boomerang video and I can see my merry Christmas thing as well.

And then I can see it going into the video there. So that's really how you can add your own content. Use some of those features like writing on images that boomerang videos. And there's just a ton of tools in there for you to get creative. So I would recommend you come in look at some of those top influencers see how they're using them. Remember that unfortunately if you're just getting started you won't be able to link off to your Web site at his stories until you have 10000 followers. But it is a fantastic way to drive traffic and another incentive for you to really build up your audience so you can open up that feature within Instagram stories. Zanetti you know what Instagram stories are how to use them where they appear and how to add content. Go ahead and create an Instagram story for yourself following the steps that you've learned in this video.

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