How To Use IG Stories and Live For Instagram Growth and Engagement

Hello beautiful people. Welcome back to the Instagram Guru blog!

In today's post, we're gonna talk about Insta Story and Insta Live, and how you can use each of them to grow your audience, and get more followers on your page. And no, they are not exactly the same thing.

First of all, let's break down the difference between Insta Story and Insta Live.

Insta Stories are videos, posts, whatever that you upload to your stories, and they're only available for 24 hours unless you add them to your highlights section on your page, then they stay there forever. Now with Insta Stories, you can include a bunch of different like emojis. They have functions like mention people, using hashtags, locations in your Insta Story, all of that. And you have a swipe up feature if you are above 10,000 followers, and you can redirect people to an external link, or a website, or whatever.

Insta Lives are essentially sessions where you go live. You can't edit them. You can't upload them and then delete them like Insta Story, and kind of you don't edit them. They are live, just live sessions. And if you do a live, you can decide whether or not you wanna share it on your page for the next 24 hours and essentially people can view it like an Insta Story, or you can just do a live and delete it. If people decided to tune in, they saw it. If not, they missed out. Usually, I tend to save my lives for 24 hours because they do have valuable information in them, and people wanna watch them more than just once, or they might wanna watch it later if they couldn't tune into the actual live.

How do we actually use both of these to grow?

Let's start off with Insta Stories. Insta Stories are a great tool for getting additional visibility on your page from new audience members, and people that aren't even following you. And how do you actually do that? First of all, you have to utilize Insta Stories in a way that gives people that feeling where they're getting a behind the scenes look. You're building a new relationship with them. You can show them what you do in your spare time. You can show them your workouts. You can show them what you eat, stuff that you're passionate about. You can just hop on and talk about a topic you're really interested in. This is to build a connection, a new connection with people.

Now in addition to that, Insta Stories have a lot of built in functions for new visibility. So kind of like what I was talking about before, Insta Stories allow you to tag people, they allow you to use hashtags, and they allow you to use locations. These are all phenomenal things. And so, obviously if you mention someone in your story, tag them in there. But, let's exclude that because that's not really gonna give you a lot new visibility, unless you know, that person's not following you or something. If you use the hashtag, you can use one hashtag on Insta Story as just like a sticker hashtag, or you can actually add up to 10 hashtags by just typing them out like you would any normal text on Insta Story. And what ends up happening when you use those hashtags, you pop up on that hashtag's Insta Story. So if you go to a hashtag that you really, really like, there's always going to be like a circle of Insta Stories at the very top of that hashtag, and your Insta Story, if you use their hashtag, is going to show up there for 24 hours.

Anybody that sees that Insta Story is going to see your Insta Story for that hashtag. Can you imagine the immense visibility that that could give your page if you're using bigger hashtags, or even just targeted hashtags?

Another thing that you can do is use a location sticker, and this is essentially just like geo tagging your post. You're geo tagging your Insta Story, and then you pop up no that location's Insta Story as well. And so again, anybody that looks at that location's Insta Story sees your page, is gonna hop on, and see what you're all about.

Now in addition to that, Insta Story helps you connect with your existing audience in a way that Insta Live really can't. You have polls where you can do kind of market research, or ask your audience questions. There's the questions sticker, where your audience can ask you things, and then you can choose to share their question and your response, or not, totally up to you. You also have different like emojis which you can use, which spice up your Insta Story a little bit, and kind of show like what you're all about, and what emojis you like using. Insta Stories have a bunch of these built in functions, and Instagram invested a lot of money in developing them, so they want you to use them. So definitely take advantage of that.

Your Insta Story strategy should be to share the behind the scenes of your life, and build a new connection with your audience while using all these built in tools so that you can increase your visibility.

Let's move on to Insta Live. Insta Live doesn't have any of these built in functions. Insta Live has two cool things that you can do with it. The main purpose of Insta Live is really to just foster that existing relationship with your audience. This is a way for them to get more of you. Not so much a behind the scenes, but just kind of like a one-on-one connection. When you hop on live, you're unedited. You're totally raw, and people see you the way you are, and that helps build that connection. Now another way to foster that connection is Insta Live actually has the ability to invite people to your live. So let's say you're doing a Q&A on Insta Live, and you wanna invite your audience members to hop on your live, and ask you questions so that you can answer in real time.

They'll send you a request, and you can approve it, and what'll happen is the screen will split into two. Your Insta Live will be at the top, and they will be at the bottom, and you're just communicating. It's like a video chat. It is a very, very intimate way to connect with your audience, and people love it. And so, like I said, Insta Live is just meant to foster that existing relationship, and kind of give more of yourself to your audience, but it's not necessarily used for finding new audience members that aren't already following you.

I hope you guys found this post valuable. If you did, please make sure to give it a thumbs up, and drop a comment below just saying hi, or what you really appreciated about the article. It really helps me out, and I appreciate it a lot. And of course, if there are any topics that you would like me to cover in next week's video, or future videos, drop a comment below, or shoot me a message on Instagram, @workout_unicorn. I would be more than happy to address your topics.

I will see you all next week!