Instagram stories are a fun way to engage with your audience but sometimes it can feel challenging to continually come up with new ideas that won’t bore your audience. To effectively use Instagram stories, you’ll need to be creative, fun, unique and engaging.

So today on the blog, I’ll be giving you here are 25+ creative Instagram Story ideas to inspire you.

Ready? Let’s dive in!

Engagement Boosting Story Ideas:

• Conduct a poll. Creating a poll is a great way to engage and learn more about your audience—their needs and their feedback about your products and services. You can also post polls on fun topics like “tea or coffee?” “Summer or Winter” etc.

• Host a Q&A. This allows your audience to connect with your audience and for them to know more about your brand, your team and your products/services. Plus, you’ll learn about information gaps between you and your audience. 

There are several ways you do this, you can:

Use the questions sticker. This is a fun and interactive way to address frequently asked questions and better educate your audience. By using the questions sticker for Stories, you’ll be able to collect questions from your audience and organise your responses.

Answer questions using video. Another fun way of interacting with your audience is through video—whether live or recorded. Again, you can collect questions from your followers and answer them. This is perfect for tapping into the visual nature of the platform and keeping your audience visually stimulated.

Then based on the questions you get, you can create a “Frequently Asked Questions” highlight that will live on your Instagram profile. You can also use this for your website.

• Create themed spotlight stories. Create stories about events, important holidays, hot topics that are important to your audience, like a spotlight on businesses or month-long events. You can even add products themed on these events, not only is it a great way to connect with your audience but you can promote your product at the same time.

• Spotlight your customers. Not only will you be able to continue building relationships with your existing customers, but you will also attract new ones.

• Create a fun quiz for your followers. Another fun and engaging way to connect with your followers plus you can also gain insights about them through quizzes.

• Repost user-generated content. Find and repost what your audience has posted - it can be a positive review or one that is related to your brand. You can also look to incentivise UGC content by offering a gift voucher to one lucky winner per month who is resharing your brand to their stories.

• Host a giveaway. Who wouldn’t resist a giveaway? Not only does it motivate your followers to share your brand it also makes a great way to give back to them, earning their loyalty. When hosting a giveaway, make sure to provide all the details on a regular post, you can even share this multiple times in your story to make sure many of your followers are aware of it.

• Start a challenge. Hosting a challenge has great potential to be viral, not only does it increase your visibility but it is also a fun way to engage with your followers.

• Use the features is the “Add Yours” sticker. This allows users to add a “Story” connected to a specific thread.

• Start a hashtag. Create a hashtag and encourage your followers to use it when using your products or services. Additionally, you can search relevant hashtags to find posts that feature your brand that aren’t tagged yet.

• Provide helpful tips using creative graphics in line with your brand. Create stories that add value (like tips, round-ups, how-to’s, etc) but instead of plain text, get creative and put them in a picture/image. When it comes to stories, graphics are important to make your post visually appealing.

• Team/Company Spotlights. Instagram Stories give you the perfect opportunity to get more up close and personal with your audience. Share recent events, and company updates and spotlight your team. 

• Introduce People to Your Team. Consumers want to know who is behind their favourite products and services. You can introduce new team members or share an employee story.- This helps to put a human face to your brand and builds a closer relationship with your audience especially if you're new to small brands that are just entering the market. Over time, this can translate to stronger brand loyalty.

• Share behind-the-scenes footage and show how your products are made. Consumers like transparency. Give details and show the process and behind the scenes like how you create content, a day in the life, the details, etc. Just like consumers want to know who is behind their favourite products and services, they also want to know behind the scenes/about their favourite products and services.

Your content depends on what’s going on in your company and your current goals. If it's a current product or service you’re launching or an event- you can show a sneak peek or a video snippet of the product, location, etc.

• Celebrate milestones. Share your company's achievements and make sure to tie them to your clients and community, thanking them for their support and continued trust in your brand.

• Do a takeover. An Instagram takeover is a unique marketing tactic which allows you to partner with someone to take over your account for a short time. It can be 24 hours or several days. The host will introduce themselves to your audience and will post updates throughout the duration of the takeover. You could even start an employee takeover series where each of your team members shares a “day in the life of” post throughout the day.

Products and Services

Take a screenshot and share images of your products and services via stories to make sure they won’t get buried in the main feed.

• Share testimonials and reviews. Showcase your best customer testimonials or reviews to share social proof with your audience.

• Spotlight products and services. Focus on certain products or services and highlight them using your Instagram stories including what makes your product or service unique.

• Collect feedback using emoji sliders. Your followers are 4x more likely to respond to a message containing an emoji. Use emoji sliders to let your audience rate your products The emoji slider sticker is an interactive way to let your followers rate your products and ask more questions, Most importantly, it encourages them to respond faster.

• Promote discounts and special offers using fun stickers. Instagram Stories are a great place to share a promotion or discounts. To help you stand out and to make it fun, add stickers to your promotions and discounts like animated stickers and timer stickers counting down to the end of your sale so people will feel the need to take action faster.

Educational and Informative Content

• Share industry news. Share current and important news in your industry that your followers will be interested in and keep them up to date with the information that they will find useful. When sharing information, make sure to provide context and make it concise, clear, and short.

• Post quick tutorials. For this to work successfully, your tutorial has to be short, valuable, straight to the point, and include strong visuals that will capture your audience’s attention as they swipe right.

• Share a Buying Guide. This is a subtle way of putting your products in front of your customers without being pushy. Help them decide the best product that fits their needs by giving them suggestions and information, especially for followers who’ve shown interest but are not sure what to buy.

Miscellaneous

There you have it! With these fun and engaging Instagram story tips, you’re on your way to creating a viral Instagram story.

In the meantime, what are your favourite story ideas? Have you experimented with some of the ideas above? Let me know in the comments or connect with me on Instagram, I’d love to know!