Today I am talking about Instagram Stories (the camera in the top left corner of our Instagram – it’s there for 24 hours and it’s 15 second).

The 5 – WHY’s

1. Access

One of the biggest things you can give your audience is access to you, your life your content, your tips – access is what we crave in a digital world and you can do this in under 15 seconds or under a minute a day.

2. Touch points

If you’re a business owner then it take 14-18 touch points for someone to buy from you. You can reach this many touch points  in a week

3. People feel like they know you.

Things like IG stories takes you from know, like and trust factor to known LOVE and trust factor.

4. Connection

Real connection through DM’s, comments, voice and video message

5. Multi Content Consumers

We are multi content consumers with short attention spans and and our phones are part of our lives

Get 50 free content ideas you can start using today!

Get your content ideas checklist (above) but my biggest tips when it comes to content are this:

• If you struggle then focus on your audience and not on yourself
• It’ll help you get more comfortable on camera (Gemma Carr Photography)
• Treat your followers like real people – if I saw you in the morning, what would I say?
• When I’m doing work what can I share – so when I’m in it, I’m sharing. So for example I had to record a video for speaking gig I have and I have a camera stand on my desk – it means that I can really quickly and easily shoot the video – upload to Dropbox on my phone and send the link to the person for them to access it, so I shared about my stand this morning and a few of my community went and purchased their own. Make it easy for yourself.
• One of the biggest issues I think people have is that they think they have to CREATE content. You are the content – you’re taking them along with you to where you’re going, what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, what you’re thinking, what you’re learning – that is your content
• Types of content – You can use video, images, music, filters, reshare content – so if you don’t want to be on camera all the time you don’t have to be – think of creative ways
• Captions – this is a big one, around 80% of people watch stories without the sound on and I do find this a little hard as you just want to create content as quickly as possible but it matters, so I try and do captions as often as I can. There are apps but I’ve personally found that they take as much time as typing them out because they’re not accurate.
• One tip that I have is that you can create your captions from audio – so you can speak them if you use the microphone.
• Story take overs – this is something I want to do in the next few months is someone who I think my audience would love, I want to get them to create content and then send it to me to post. It’s a bit of fun and if you do it as a swap with someone it could be great for growing your audience too.
• Questions – getting to know your audience and what they want, think. Use polls and questions to get feedback, get them to ask you questions, find out what their biggest struggles are when it comes to what you do or help with.
• It will increase your sales if you add calls to action and share promo posts as well. – it’s a combination strategy and one that works great with other content sharing that you have because it’s casual and in the moment.

Links

• Freebie
• Book
• Confidence Rising