Instagram stories are one of the best ways to connect with your audience. Unlike grid posts, your stories don’t need to be perfectly curated. By being more authentic and unpolished you often get better engagement from your audience and potential clients. Stories can help your audience connect with you as a person, rather than just with your brand. While the content in your stories can be less polished than your grid posts, keeping them updated daily is time-consuming. Here are five tips to help you batch-create Instagram stories so you are never stuck at the last minute again!
Instagram Stories Game Plan
When it comes to Instagram stories, we often don’t post when we feel like there’s nothing exciting going on. When you run a wedding business, you’ll know that not every day at work is glamorous. It can feel like most days you don’t actually have anything story-worthy to share. But every day is a new opportunity for potential clients to connect with you, so not taking advantage of Instagram’s story feature can be a missed opportunity. Without a plan or direction, it can make it really difficult to decide on what to post.
First, decide how active you’d like to be on your Instagram stories. How many days of the week and how many posts are realistic for you? From there, you’ll have a rough idea of how much story content you’ll need. Next, it’s time to brainstorm content ideas for your stories. Go back through your most recent weddings and events to see what you could share. Have you received some great testimonials recently? Make a list of all the content you already have and decide what the purpose of that content would be. Would this story give insight into your life? Does it inspire potential clients, or educate them? Does it encourage them to visit your website, or make them aware of a new deal? Once you’ve compiled a list of content you could be posting about that is related to your business, it’s now time to think about the non-work related stories.
Pick Your Instagram Story Topics
In addition to sharing Instagram stories that are promotional for your business, you should choose two topics that you can regularly share. This could be travelling, cooking or your pet. Once you know your additional story topics, it makes it easier to pinpoint moments when you can capture content for your stories. Knowing what to be posting on your stories will be much easier when you know what content you want to share.
Save Your Inspiration
Even with your list of brainstormed content ideas and content topics, we won’t always be bursting with ideas for our stories. This is why it’s always a great idea to save reels and posts that inspire you. Has someone shared something interesting that you could share your own take on? Do you like the way someone has designed their post? By compiling things that inspire you, you’ll always have a mood board to give you ideas for your own content.
You can even save content that inspires you and share it on your story as a weekly or monthly roundup of work that has inspired you.
Build an Instagram Story Tool Kit
Once you know what content you want to include in your stories, it’s time to think about how to share it aesthetically. Your stories should be engaging and authentic to you. You can use tools like Canva to design templates that you can easily customise and reuse. By using templates, it can help you keep your branding and aesthetic clear across your stories. Once you’ve made a few templates you love, reusing them will save you loads of time.
You should also consider using engagement tools in your stories. These can be added directly to Instagram. Using the poll and quiz features, your audience will be encouraged to engage directly with your work, which can boost your stories’ viewing numbers.
Don’t forget to include the occasional call to action. If you share a story with a blog or your website, make sure you use a catchy CTA to drive the viewership to your desired link.
Staying Consistent
It’s important to stay consistent on Instagram in order to build and maintain a relationship with your audience. If you want to post a story at the same time every day, but can’t guarantee that you’ll be available to do so, you can look into scheduling tools like Metricool. These sites allow you to load in your batch-prepped stories to go out automatically without you having to worry. If you can commit the time to schedule your work, it will save you loads of time in the long run.
Making a list of content and ideas that you can share on your story, batch-creating content using tools like Canva and scheduling your stories so that they are posted regularly and automatically will make it much easier for you to stay on top of your stories and take the stress away from story making.
If you are struggling to stay consistent or keep up with your social media, maybe it’s time to consider a virtual assistant. To see the full range of Virtual Assistant services I provide, click here.