Ways to Use Instagram Stories for Ecommerce Businesses

Instagram is one of the fastest growing social media platforms, with a range of features your business could be taking advantage of. With over 500 million daily users, Instagram lets you reach new customers and build a connection with your current ones. If you’re not already using Instagram’s Stories feature, you could be missing out on a huge business opportunity!

Instagram Stories allow you to post updates that disappear after 24 hours. They are often used by businesses, companies and influencers to give a ‘behind-the-scenes’ perspective on their brand, and are extremely useful in building a community, increasing engagement in your account, and building brand awareness! They can even drive sales higher and increase leads to sales conversions.

There are a number of ways to use Instagram stories for Ecommerce Business, and here we’ll outline some of the top methods to get the most out of your Instagram Stories.

Polls

One of the best parts of Instagram Stories is the polls sticker – this allows you to poll your followers, with two-options that they can vote on by simply clicking on the sticker.

You can ask things like ‘what would you like to see next?’ and give two options. You can then post the poll results to show you are listening to your audience and posting content related to what they want to see.

Other polls for Ecommerce Businesses include asking what colors they prefer, what products they like best, or what they think of current events that align with your company values.

Emoji Slide Stickers

These stickers work by simply gauging how much an audience likes something – you can post a new product update and attach an emoji slide sticker to see how much, on average, your audience likes something.

“You can also use Emoji Slide stickers more creatively by adding degrees on the slider – then your followers can drag the slider to the degree they want to communicate to you, the brand, what their priorities are,” says Ashley Flynn, a business writer at Boomessays and Stateofwriting.

Both polls and emoji slide stickers are an easy way to increase engagement and let your followers feel personally involved in your business.

Question Stickers

Question stickers are another popular and powerful feature on Instagram Stories – you can do an ‘ask us anything about [x]’ and wait for the questions to roll in. Other examples might be gathering feedback on products (‘what do you think of [x]?’) or asking what their favorite products from your brand are.

If you really want to make your Instagram account standout, you can talk about more ‘off-topic’ things, like asking your followers how they are feeling about certain events (like the COVID-19 lockdown) or what their favorite thing to do in summer is. If you can somehow tie these in with your brand and products, even better!

Quiz Stickers

Quiz stickers are another great way to drive up community engagement and make your audience check your stories. Simply post a quick quiz, with three answers, about something relevant to your business – it might be your values, your founding year, or what your next new release is going to be.

Go Live

Going live on Instagram is a really successful way to gain instant engagement from your followers. This is because Instagram will send a notification to let your followers know you are going live, and they can join the stream, real-time, and ask questions. Make sure to plan your live video and have something to talk about in case you don’t receive many questions in the stream! A popular way to go about doing this is to post the question sticker with ‘ask us anything’ (for example) and then go live to answer all the questions you received.

“Remember,” says Serena Moss, a marketer at Australianhelp and Paperfellows “Instagram sends a notification to all your followers who are using Instagram at that moment. So, it’s a good idea to find out when most of your followers are active and go live at that time.”

Product Stickers

Last, but certainly not least, don’t forget to use the product stickers feature. You can place these on images and videos, and followers can click-through to where they can buy the product. Think of the possibilities here – you can post a video of a model wearing all of your jeweler, with each piece tagged with a product sticker. Or post some photographs of a new collection. The possibilities are endless!