How to use Instagram stories to cover events

• Thinking of incorporating Instagram stories into your marketing strategy?
• Have you ever wondered how other companies do it?

Instagram stories are increasingly being used, currently they have more than 260 million users, leaving 100 million Snapchat customers behind.

A study we conducted last year noted that generation Y and especially generation Z tend to gravitate towards an online experience increasingly individualized, choosing Instagram as their favorite platform. This could be a potential customer base for many brands.

At least in Latin America Snapchat has ceased to be effective for business and now is the time to focus on the Instagram story boom and take advantage of its features that allow you to engage customers and leads with a more complete message than a simple image can provide.

First things first: Instagram basics

To take full advantage of the power of these features, first make sure your stories enhance your brand image. That being said, you should publish your stories at an optimal time for your audience, especially if the story only lasts 24 hours. 

Also, it’s important to note that frequency is valuable to Instagram, given its algorithm, the more posts you make, the more likely you are to appear at the top of someone’s Instagram account while on the platform.

If you recently created a story, a circle will automatically be displayed around your profile picture, this will be an indicator to your audience that you have been recently active, which will attract their attention and will result in clicks.

If your Instagram story is popular enough, you will likely appear in the Search and Explore tab of the application, this allows you to cover more users than those who normally follow you.

One of its most recent updates is the function of being able to automatically archive your stories even after they expire, this way you can choose the most relevant ones and add them to the “highlight stories” section in your account profile.

Now that we have made a short summary we can move on to the most important part.

How to use your Instagram stories to cover events?

I’m going to tell you how my team and I found a way to convert an Instagram story campaign to cover an event, into content that is still being used months later.

A way to do marketing on Instagram by encouraging participation with stories.

#1 Highlight your stories by summarizing the day

In our company we usually cover many events digitally, and it’s true, Instagram is a great tool for this. The act of publishing stories and classifying them in highlights helped greatly since many people don’t have time to click on them every time they are updated. 

We discovered that the audience at the event loved being able to have a daily summary of our CEO’s day, posted each evening. What we did was to record our CEO and at the end of the day and complement the recording with several images in stop-motion mode. This resulted in more followers, comments, etc., adding more hashtags to the actual post.

#2 Record videos longer than 15 seconds

At the time of covering the event we realized that we could only upload 15-second videos, so our designer had to quickly edit the videos in order to publish them.  We discovered that this little “mishap” was actually a blessing.

We were able to use the longer videos to publish directly on Facebook, Twitter and even YouTube. These slightly longer videos helped offer even more context to the event on other networks outside of Instagram.

#3 Use Twitter as a catapult

Twitter is essential when covering events due to its immediacy, in our case we really saw a lot of activity on this social network promoting our Instagram stories. We would take screenshots of the Instagram story and use it to entice people to our account.

There was an immediate increase in story views and in the activity of our tweets, the number of people who went from Twitter to Instagram led to an increase of our Instagram followers.

#4 Think of enduring visuals

With few resources at hand, it was important for us to think about what photos we could take at the event that would have a “lasting” impact .

We then developed a strategy that included asking people at the event a question with the brand’s hashtag. Then we asked them to write their response on a board and we took a photo with them for our Instagram stories.

This helped connect the people participating with our company and even gained us some permanent followers, as well as supported the provision of content that continues to be used to this day, with the brand’s hashtag.

#5 Make sure you continue to charm your audience

If at the end of the event you are no longer sure what content to share with your audience, the best thing you can do is ask them. Take a survey with Facebook to get feedback so you can improve your engagement.

The key to success here is to be consistent, apply good practices and have a sincere approach towards your target audience. Only in this way will you take full advantage of Instagram, since it should not be forgotten that the more human the brands, the more credibility they will generate.

Conclusion

Today Instagram is a monster of social networks, with approximately 500 million active users per month and even more surprising is the percentage of these users who interact with brands, around 68%.

And despite the power that Instagram has as a platform for business and as a growth channel, only 36% of marketers are there…this is a gigantic mistake on their part, as the stories will continue to gain more and more strength and recognition among the marks

The Instagram platform is incredibly good for growth, if you are already on Facebook then the next step is to put together a strategy here, in this article we have shown you that you don’t need a big budget to put together a fast and effective campaign.

What do you think, have you used Instagram stories in your marketing strategies? Share your opinions in the comments section, great success in your campaigns and see you surfing the net!

Andrea Bates , 05 May 2021