Instagram Stories and blogging
How I encouraged my followers to read my blog posts
We’re all familiar with Instagram (I hope) and Instagram Stories.
But just in case, Instagram is a photo sharing app where users can upload images and videos to their profile or send posts privately via messenger. Users can also like, comment and share other peoples’ content.
Instagram Stories is an in-app feature that allowers users to upload images and videos to their newsfeed, before automatically deleting after 24 hours. Instagram Stories is now a popular tool in getting personal pictures, advertising messages and marketing content out there, with 400 million daily users of the feature.
I used Instagram Stories twice when promoting my blog posts.
I chose to promote my blogs on my Instagram page as I have a reasonable following (over 2,500 people) and have previously used my personal page to share articles and blogs from my placement year, especially when I’m proud of my work.
On Instagram, whilst Influencers and other ‘important’ people can feature links to external pages in stories, so far us ordinary folk don’t have this option. This means that to get people to actually visit my blog post, they have to exit my story, visit my personal profile and click the link in my bio. In terms of the audience members journey from viewing my story (on their home page) to reading my blog (on Medium), it can be a longer than necessary journey. People may be put off reading my blog due to the effort they have to go to to get there. Remember, humans have a shorter attention span than a goldfish!
To encourage people to make the effort to read my blog, my stories needed to be convincing.
In my first story, I use GIFS (the pointing thumbs) to show the viewer what the story is about. Directly asking the question, “Want to check it out?” to the viewer may make them question, “Do I?”.
I use the word ‘first’ in both of my stories. In the second, the number is used to describe the blog as the first of the year. Using this term almost adds a sense of exclusivity to my posts, with readers potentially being the first person to read my both blogs.
In the blog post to the right, I use famous faces (in the form of GIF’s) to capture peoples’ attention. It had previously proven well to mention these three celebrities (who do feature in the blog) on Twitter in order to drive engagement. To direct people to my blog, I use the GIF ‘link in bio’ to show people where they can find it.
Whilst I, unfortunately, cannot view the analytics to see who visited my blog from my Instagram page, I’m trying to find a way and if this is possible, I will update this post in due course. However, some of my followers did message me about my blog and many people did view my story, so there was some engagement at least.
