Tell Your Story, With Instagram Stories
Recently, Instagram launched its Stories feature. Stories allows you to share your everyday moments complete with your own doodles, stickers and captions, which are displayed for 24 hours only. Instagram is a photo sharing app known for perfectly composed and aesthetically pleasing photos that make up your profile. Throw in the fact that posts are subjected to likes and comments, and you end up with a highly edited and curated experience. Instagram Stories changes all that! They are fast, fun and much less pressure to produce than a standard Instagram post.
A notable feature of Stories is that it allows Instagram users to get a slice of the popular Snapchat experience without ever leaving the Instagram app. This makes it very user-friendly, especially for non-millennials who may not be as tech savvy. Its casual nature and absence of likes and comments means that people are more likely to be authentic. So what happens when you take this fleeting, judgment-free experience and add it to the broader context of Instagram? Instagram Stories offers a fun way to share your moments with your personality without any pressure to be perfect.
How does it work?
To create a story on Instagram, tap the new “+” icon at the top left-hand corner of the screen, or you can reveal the story camera by simply swiping left.
Once the story camera is open you can take a photo or record a video, just as you normally would on Instagram. After you’ve recorded your video or taken a photo, you can use a range of filters and add text and drawings to your content as well.
You can also choose to feature a particular part of your story by posting it on your profile so it will appear within the feed. To do this, tap the upload button (highlighted in the image above).
Tip: How to add content from your camera roll.
You can also upload content created within the last 24 hours from your camera roll. To do this, simply swipe downwards on the stories camera, and you’ll see the latest content from your camera roll appear at the top of your screen. From here, simply select the content you’d like to add to your story.
Why we love it:
1. Don’t worry about overposting.
When you post a photo or video to your story, it appears in a row at the to of your followers’ Feeds and they can tap it to see your story. Since the story only lasts for 24 hours, you don’t have to worry about overwhelming people’s feeds. Instead, you can share as much as you want throughout the day — with as much creativity as you want.
2. Keepin’ it real.
If the Instagram feed has become a place for only the most polished, overly produced photos and videos, then Stories is a way to add some authenticity to the content that appears in the feed. With Stories, brands have a chance to take their followers on a journey and tell the story behind the posts in their feed. Imagine seeing a brand new post from your favorite restaurant featuring a popular dish pop up in your Instagram feed, and then being able to go behind the scenes with the chef to watch the making of the dish.
3. User Experience.
Visually appealing and easy to use, it should come as no surprise that there are approximately 500 million Instagram users since its launch in 2010. If you follow someone, you'll see their posts - easy peasy! With this new storyboard feature built right into the app, Instagram makes it easy to try it out and create fun, new posts with Instagram Stories!