What Should I Post on Stories? Instagram Story Ideas for Business Owners
Instagram/Facebook Stories are a great way to engage your audience and show them more of the “real you” behind your business. Stories, which are essentially slides that disappear after 24 hours, can be still images, graphics, or videos with the option to overlay text and stickers. They’re a fun, interactive, casual, real-time way to connect with your followers and promote your work.
When you have an active Story, the platform circles your profile photo with a border and bumps it up to the Story feed in your followers’ accounts. Both of these make you more visible and give your followers an easy way to interact with and get to know you.
OK. Now that you’re excited to get your Stories going, what should you post? I have so many Facebook and Instagram Story ideas for business owners!
Go behind the scenes
Give the people what they want: Your work, unfiltered. Show them where and how you work. Show them your messy desk. Show them your file reorganization project. Show them your creative space and your storeroom. People love to see how the sauce gets put together.
Feature a team member
Help your followers get to know your whole business by featuring an employee, intern, or even a regular contractor in a Story. Do an introduction, a tour of their work station, a Q & A, or talk about their background and experience. Video is great for get-to-know-you Stories. If your team member is up for it, they could even take over the company Stories for the day!
How-tos and tutorials
Show people how to use your product or service. Tutorials are a great way to deliver value by giving people something concrete to do or learn. A brief step-by-step series of videos can do the trick. If you do a bunch of them, you can even save them under a How-To or Tutorials Highlight on your Instagram profile so your followers can find them all in one place.
Tips & tricks
Like how-to Stories, giving your followers concrete advice is really valuable. And it’s easy. Sharing simple tips and tricks in your industry not only gest good information out there, it establishes you as an authority in your niche and signals that you’re generous with your knowledge. At FFM, we do a “Tip Thursday” that centers around advice related to marketing and branding.
Stickers, polls & questions!
I always encourage heavy use of interactive stickers in your Stories. Stickers create interactions with your audience and trigger the algorithm to place your content more prominently in your followers’ feeds.
Find stickers at the top of the Stories menu and type in a relevant term! Remember: Your goal with Stories is to create relatable content to help people connect and engage with you.
Inspirational words
People love to be encouraged. Any time you can, share inspirational or motivational words. They will help you communicate your values, draw in like-minded people, and put good vibes into the world.
In your Stories, you can go a step further by implementing a more organized weekly motivational series. For instance, at FFM, we do a “Message Monday” series featuring words of encouragement branded with our tarot card-inspired design, a practice that shares good content while elevating visual brand awareness and staying on theme.
All your favorites
People love to get to know you. Share the incidentals of your work life: What house plants sit next to you at your computer, what you saw on your walk during your last break, your new unicorn hair clip, the best team snacks.
Around here, we do a “Listening Lately” feature on Fridays, sharing what song we’re playing on repeat at the moment.
Content from other accounts
People are really into knowing what you’re into. That includes other people’s content—and Stories is a great place to share it. If someone talks about how great your services or products are (that’s called user-generated content), by all means, share it in your Stories!
But you can also just share things that you’re reading, things that are relevant to your industry, things that you find beautiful or worth talking about. Since Stories is an in-the-moment part of your platform, highlighting other content is a perfect way to show others what you’re doing with your time and what you consider to be quality content (which further establishes you in your niche and develops online bonds with your followers).
