How to cover an event on Instagram Stories: 9 tips
Not too long ago, I had the pleasure of covering 3 live events on social media and particularly, on Instagram stories, for a few of Auditoire’s clients.
To prepare for this, I did some research and took some notes from my own experience. This article is a summary of those notes and experiences. I hope you find it useful.
Let’s dive in.
1. Your frame of mind: Inclusive content
On IG stories, you want your content to feel inclusive.
You want to make other people (watching the coverage) feel like they were part of your event, rather than making them feel frustrated because they weren’t invited to the party.
For me, it was helpful to always ask myself the following question before posting:
Will someone who is not at this event feel like they got something valuable out of this video/image or will it just make them frustrated for not being invited?
For example, it’s much better to post a powerful speaker quote with a photo of the speaker on stage, instead of a video where we can barely hear them, the frame is blurry and shot from afar and we don’t really know what they’re talking about because the video started in the middle of the speech and lasted for 10 seconds.
2. Try to make your IG stories feel connected to each other
An Instagram story is, well… a story. And stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Similarly, try to make your story feel like a string of little stories connected to each other. What does this translate to? ⤵
Give your viewers a little tour of the place (starting from entering the building and going through check-in), explain any historical landmarks on site, and only then delve into the nitty-gritty of the event. You can see how we tried to do this for the WISE Summit here.
Of course, not every panel in your IG stories (aka every individual story) will lead to the next, but try to make the previous panel introduce the next one whenever possible.
And of course, include a ‘winding down’ / ‘thank you’ / ‘see you tomorrow’ post at the end of the day.
3. Create ‘content categories’
Something I saw VivaTech do so well is that they created several ‘content categories’ to break up and refresh their IG story coverage. They had categories like:
- “Overheard at VivaTech” that included random — and usually funny — quotes from the event participants
- “Top tags of the day” where they re-shared the best tags they received from other IG users
- “VivaTech meets the world” where they showcased the diversity of the event
For the WISE Summit, our content categories were:
- “Meet an education innovator” where we interviewed representatives from 2 WISE programs
- “The future of education” where we asked summit participants what should educators focus on in the next 10 years (my favorite response is below 😊)
- “Young leaders in education” where we did interviews with leaders from 2 WISE programs
If you want to have content categories, however, this usually means that you’ll have to prepare a flyer with the title of the category to introduce the content that follows, like the one my colleague Charles André created, for example:
4. Involve viewers in any way you can
Not only do viewers want to know what happened at your event, but they also want to contribute to it.
Try to make them vote on something with the “Poll” feature on IG stories, give their opinions through the “Questions” feature or offer them the opportunity to react with that slider button.
VivaTech did this by having an “Agree to disagree” content category, where they had on-stage debates on an issue and then asked the viewers to vote on that same issue.
Here’s one way we wanted to involve our online viewers at the WISE Summit:
5. Color, color, and more color
This one is rather simple & straightforward, but important nonetheless. You want your stories to have as much color as possible — it draws in the eye and it also gives the impression that the event was fun and lively.
(notice how the image above is very colorful, which was done intentionally 😉)
6. Framing your visuals
Even though a picture is worth a thousand words, words do matter — especially in an IG story (given that people don’t usually turn the sound on).
If we make the assumption that most of your stories will include some sort of text in them, make sure you choose an angle for the image/video that will allow you to have some ‘free space’ to write words on.
We tried to do this with the image below, where we purposefully left an empty space on the upper and lower right side (the sky & the path) so that we could include the text.
7. Beware of the number of stories you post
Ok, this one can be tricky because the number of stories depends a lot on the quality of the coverage and the resources dedicated to it. Normally if viewers see a lot of little lines in the story (like the image below), they won’t bother looking through it. Having said that, I counted VivaTech’s and their Day 1 coverage included 50 panels, while they ended Day 2 with 48 panels — and I clicked through all of them because they did such a good job that 50 panels didn’t feel like a lot. This is the exception rather than the rule, however.
Depending on the resources you have in place to cover the event, I would say around 20 original content panels is a good start.
8. On RT-ing other people’s stories
My personal taste and preference is not to re-share other people’s IG stories unless they’re really, really good or come from a very important person.
The point of IG story coverage is to create original content. As the event ‘insider,’ you know what’s cool about it and what aspects should be highlighted.
9. One last thing
Make sure you use a good phone camera & even more important -> make sure you wipe the camera lens before taking a video or a photo. There’s nothing worse than looking at an image taken from a camera lens that’s not clean. I’ve seen a surprising amount of IG stories taken with a dirty camera and that’s just not cool.
For my coverage, I used an iPhone Xs and it worked great.
*****
My favorite IG story live coverage benchmark (that of VivaTech) is here, here and here.
You can see how well (or not) I followed my own advice here and here.
Have any other tips? Agree/disagree with some of my points above? Please drop a line below.
