Business
Are you running out of Instagram poll ideas to increase your IG Story engagement? Ever since Instagram Stories became available many small business owners have been trying to capitalise on this feature. When compared to the IG feed, an Instagram Story calls for more creativity. Recently, a business owner in my network mentioned that IG Stories is where she has more fun. Depending on your brand messaging it may not be possible to add humour to your Story posts. Let me know if you can relate to these obstacles. Publishing to IG Stories every day can be time-consuming because you'll need ideas for both feed and Story posts. Even if you had a list of 10 Story ideas the next hurdle would be setting aside time to create them. Of course, there's also the added hassle of adding captions, hashtags, emojis, text, interactive stickers and at mentions. If only there was a way to obtain a list of Instagram Story ideas that you can quickly create 30 days of content and schedule it out to publish daily. In this post, I'll help you get a huge list of IG Story ideas and you'll learn how to create and schedule 30+ posts so you can set it and forget it. Disclosure: Please note that this post may contain affiliate links which means that if you buy one of my recommended products I get paid a commission for sharing the link at no additional cost to you. I only recommend products that I have tried myself and have experienced success. History of IG Stories One of the best ways to appreciate features on social media is to look at the history of Instagram Stories. After all, wouldn't it be nice to grasp the development of this unique technology? Instagram launched Stories back in 2016 and there was a bit of backlash from the social media industry. The reason for the backlash was because Snapchat already had a similar feature on their platform. What made IG Stories different is that the user has the ability to pause, rewind and even add filters. (anyone else enjoys filters? Woohoo!!) By November that year Instagram added live video. In January the following year skippable ads, 5-second photo and 15-second video were also added. Having the ability to respond to Stories was not added until July 2017 which was followed in December by Story highlights. Users of Instagram can take all of this functionality for granted and complain about what they can't do. However, isn't it amazing what Instagram has been able to accomplish in such a short time frame? Instagram Story Statistics Another important dimension when it comes to appreciating IG Stories is consumer statistics. As a business, it is essential to assess the potential return on investment before using precious resources to publish Stories. Did you know that there are 500+ million people who watch IG Stories daily? The average user spends approximately 30 minutes a day on the platform. 81% of people use Instagram to research products and services. A whopping 130 million tap on shopping posts every month. Strangely enough 14% of adults in the US have never heard of Instagram. Of the 1 billion users on IG, only 140 million are based in the US. Actually, 88% of Instagram users are based outside the US. Over 50% of IG accounts visit the Explore page monthly. The Fastest Way to Create Story Content Before grabbing your big list of Story ideas, let's head over to Canva to see how to create Stories fast. If you haven't heard of Canva before it is a graphic design platform that allows you to create social media images easily. It is especially great for non-creatives like me. Lol!! Best of all, there is a free forever account that you can use until you achieve pro status. When you open Canva, click on "create a design" and you should see Instagram Story in the list of options. You'll be brought to a blank screen that looks like the one below.