The Pain Paradox of Instagram Stories

What’s in Instagram’s future?

After comparing Instagram Stories with Snapchat at launch and then immersing into Stories for a week, I’ve arrived at some troubling thoughts about what Stories means for Instagram’s future, and some ideas for how brands can navigate to success.

The Easy Stuff

First, foremost, and obvious to pretty much everyone, Instagram Stories has the potential to be a major force for social brand expression. The storytelling capabilities of this good-enough-for-civilians copy of Snapchat are tremendous.

Stories’ prime and curious positioning at the top of the UI invites exploration to consume and create. Experienced Snapchatters have directly transferred their skills, allowing those who manage brands to kick off their Instagram Stories efforts in fifth gear.

Anyone who’s compared their own Instagram Stories to Snapchat has immediately noticed Instagram Stories’ dramatically expanded audience and view rates due to its massive existing user base — core vanity metrics that surely provide an attractive lure and reward for early participation and justification of effort.

All seems good with this new feature, but my initial optimism has begun to be replaced with a lurking uneasiness.

Let’s Set This Up

Now, this feeling could just be me. I’m a day one, old school user of the platform, which means I mostly follow people for their amazing photos. They tend to be total strangers I know only on Instagram. At the same time, I love change, new features, and new vectors of discovery — all to say I’m the farthest from a new feature naysayer. I like the idea of Stories.

The current trend though, is toward people using Instagram more as a social photo journal. Follow more friends, get followed by an expanding social audience. More selfies, more situational shots, more tagged subjects. Less art, less planning. Less perfectionism, less pressure. In fact, this gravitational pull of painless user experience is what has drawn people to Snapchat.

The folks at Instagram are clearly aiming their Stories product in this user-focused direction which fosters more frequent creation and a need to consume more content, all better for ad products. With Stories they’ve added on a way to express the casual alongside the curated, as I’ve explained before.

But once that gets put in front of users things start to get sticky.

Traditional Expectations Resist New Behaviors

When opening Instagram to consume or create, people have traditionally had hero content in mind. Whether it’s old school beauty or new school social, it’s still generally been the better stuff that gets (or at least remains) posted.

When thinking about creating or consuming casual content, will people think about opening Instagram to employ an entirely different functionality? Once the initial exploration phase wears off, and especially if the initial content isn’t compelling, I’m now thinking it’s possible they may not.

Not Content with the Content?

Indeed, the first phase of Stories content hasn’t been very good. I’m seeing three different kinds:

• Exploratory snaps and vids that are awkwardly and painfully similar to our first mundane and banal tweets back in the day. Lots of horizontal, too.
• Direct implementation of Snapchat-style content, except Instagram doesn’t have Snapchat’s fun stickers, filters, lenses, etc. that bring an X-factor that now clearly matters. Playing in the same brainspace as the traditional hero content of the Instagram feed, this approach is just a gaping disconnect.
• Smart content that enhances the content in the main feed. (More on this later)

What became immediately apparent to me was I generally do not care about the casual Stories content shared by the people I follow for great Instagram photos. The same kind of minutiae that’s so entertaining to me when it’s from known personalities on Snapchat Stories tends to to be entirely irrelevant to me when it’s from strangers’ lives on Instagram Stories.

Conversely, many people whose casual content I would be interested in seeing in Instagram Stories definitely do not create content I would want to see in my traditional feed.

Herein lies the problem.

The Pain Paradox

Instagram presents an all-or-nothing follow proposition at this point: following someone gets you both their traditional feed and Stories content.

• The only way to get someone’s bad content out of your Stories bar is to unfollow them, but everyone in your Stories bar is there because you already determined you want them in your traditional feed.
• The only way to get someone into your Stories is to follow them but then you may suffer their sub-par quality pics in your traditional feed.

All these factors together mean your feed sucks somewhat or your Stories might have some suck, but most likely both now suck to some degree and you can’t change that.

And, Instagram used to be exactly how you wanted it until Stories came along and complicated things.

The Price of Betrayal

When people try out a new feature of a product and discover mostly mediocre content without an easy way to control it that doesn’t alter the main reason they already use that product, the chances of them either abandoning the new feature or even the product altogether have to rise to some degree.

Sure, Instagram will likely offer an easy way to manage what appears in the Stories bar and traditional feed. That’s something a new app can do as it fails quickly and iterates quickly, evolving along with its users’ experience curve and adoption rate.

But Instagram is a mature app with slow growth in feature set and adoption, and Stories is a feature exposed to a largely complete and mature user base, one that may not receive the change favorably or know exactly how to handle it.

If this is a competitive move to keep users from switching to or spending more time in Snapchat, they’ve got to win at some level of comparison or they’re effectively inviting their own users to try the competition’s better product. In this age of single-focus mobile apps, users have the sense to open the one best app for whatever they’re trying to do.

The more I look at it, Instagram releasing the Stories feature is actually a potentially dangerous gamble, creating a distinctly forked purpose for creation and consumption that, instead of bonding users to their app by serving both casual and curated purposes as initially hoped, could decapitate it by destroying the effectiveness of either purpose.

Taking a Breath

As worried as this may sound, it’s likely Instagram Stories will work out fine. There’s a social Darwinism that tends to promote the right content for any platform and users adjust appropriately. I’m just not totally sure what’s going to happen. I do believe Snapchat’s immediate future will be just fine.

What Brands Can Do

To succeed on the new Instagram, socially savvy brands need to stand out from those who treat casual content casually.

• Accept and acknowledge that Instagram Stories is not Snapchat Stories, in features or audience, so respect each for what it is and strategize your own brand’s story accordingly. Running your Instagram Story like it’s your social media manager’s personal Snapchat is the wrong direction. I’ve seen it and it feels so wrong.
• Your users experience your Instagram Stories on the same app as your traditional Instagram content. You have to win the follow with your traditional content (since you can’t see Story content until you follow) and beat the unfollow on both fronts with great content that serves your audience’s needs and communicates your brand values in a captivating and personable way.
• Create content for Stories that dovetails with content on your traditional feed. Plan for both at the same time, keeping in mind the balanced Yin and Yang that is the casual and curated they both represent. This is easy to figure out: behind-the-scenes, interviews, bloopers, alternate shots, B-roll, how we got here, etc., captured in a way that expresses the casual side of your brand’s persona which you’ve already defined explicitly (haven’t you?).
• Pay attention to what others are doing in the space, especially your followers. Each emerging platform organically develops its own unique sensibilities, tone, and culture, and Stories will soon have its own. (This includes vertical pics and vids. Accept it.) You’ll have to behave accordingly, and there’s no better way than as a native.
• Watch your metrics — don’t get flattered by them. User numbers and view counts are inflated just like Snapchat’s since a tap-through counts the same as a whole view, so you’ve got to look at aggregate changes over time to better gauge success.
• Start strategizing now, keep iterating content until you’ve found your groove, and stick with it.

Keep Hope Alive

It’s entirely possible your brand’s content on Instagram Stories helps retain a user’s interest in the feature and keeps them coming back to the app. Create with that goal in mind and you’re on the right path regardless of what happens.

I’m a freelance social media strategist who’s worked with some of the biggest brands to create interesting ways to reach audiences and grow relationships. I’m always interested in talking social, whether over coffee, in a project, or on a podium, so get in touch if you’re interested in how I can help your brand or people be better on social media.