It’s getting harder to discourage your followers from swiping through your Stories as more and more companies are joining Instagram and putting Stories on your followers’ feeds. How can you get people to pay attention to your Stories and keep coming back for more?
Here’s a little-known secret: most people aren’t making the most of the Stories features and format.
Here, we’ll show you some of the lesser-known strategies that will awe and captivate your audience.
Experiment with different typefaces and text effects
It’s easy to add text to a Story; all you have to do is open the Stories camera, upload or record your Story, and then hit the text icon. Instagram has increased the number of available fonts from four to nine:
There are 27 distinct hues available when customising your typeface. When creating an Instagram Story, users are free to choose whatever colour they like when sketching. By tapping and holding a colour, you may bring up a whole palette. You may choose your preferred hue by repositioning the pin.
Did you know that you may individually alter the colour of individual letters, words, or even entire sections of text? By touching and holding a colour with your right thumb while choosing the entire word with your left thumb, you may create a rainbow or gradient effect by deselecting the text with your left thumb as you travel through the colour palette with your right thumb.
Also, the newest fonts have various looking backdrop effects, so check those out to get some ideas.
Spelling out a phrase with individual letters and staggering or arranging them however you wish to seem like scattered tiles is another interesting effect you can make with the text tools on Stories. Alternately, you might make a shadow effect by making two similar texts but positioning one just atop the other. There’s a lot of room for imagination.
Draw on and remove portions of an image to emphasise or conceal specific details
The doodle function is another hidden gem. Yes, you may use sketches and directional arrows in your Stories. yet it has a lot of untapped potential.
To begin, a stable foundation may be drawn with the pen tool. Easy solid backgrounds may be made by choosing any image in your Story, tapping the doodle tool, selecting the colour you want to use, then tapping and holding on the screen.
Furthermore, the highlighter feature allows for the addition of a see-through layer. If you have an image with a lot of colours and features, this is a great way to add text and other images without making the final product appear too “busy.” The pen tool may be used to add a transparent overlay in the same manner it can be used to draw on a solid backdrop.
Make use of moving image stickers GIF
Nothing grabs the viewer’s attention like a moving image, and Instagram’s GIF library is mind-boggling. Take some time to explore and find GIFs that are thematically, emotionally, and aesthetically compatible with your Story. A well-placed GIF may provide the finishing touch to a Story.
Using Create Mode, you may also make a GIF that fills the entire screen. Going into Create Mode and swiping left on the menu that displays will bring you the option to create a GIF. To find the desired GIF, enter your search terms and then tap the “Search GIPHY” button.
Make video narratives using premade formats
An tool like Boosted, which helps you create videos quickly, is invaluable when time is of the essence. The app’s collection of attractive and fashionable themes, stock footage, music, and other effects makes it simple to put together a high-quality video Story in a matter of minutes.
Using a template to build your Story saves you time, effort, and the need for a great deal of expertise and creativity since the end result is a unified, well-produced piece of work that flows nicely and looks professional.
Make use of sequence
There’s a good reason why they’re called Stories; when you use the sequential nature of the slides to your advantage, you can create compelling content that will keep your audience interested.
Using the same background picture but adding or deleting an element from each slide in sequence is a simple approach to get this effect. Use a succession of slides to gradually disclose an important part of your image, for instance, or make a list and add only one item to each show. This may be done in the Stories camera by making a first slide, downloading it as an image (using the “download” icon in the screen’s upper-center), making changes to the Story, downloading the resulting slide, and so on.
Using the tools and structure of Stories, your content creation options are limitless, and your audience will adore you for it. Spend some time familiarising yourself with the current capabilities, and keep an eye out for how other people are employing those capabilities to spark new ideas.