Instagram Stories: How and why to use this feature?
The number of users on Instagram has long exceeded 1 billion, and the world’s most famous photo and video sharing application with social network functions does not stand still — developers are constantly introducing new features. One of the biggest features in recent years has been Instagram Stories, which came in a major August 2016 update.
So, what is Instagram Stories, how does this functionality differ from a regular news feed, and why is it needed at all? By the way, in the UK localization of the application, the function is called “Stories”. Let’s start with the fact that technically this is the same tape — here you can also upload photos and videos (up to 10 seconds long) with superimposed text, emoji, music. But there is one conceptual difference — in Stories, all information is not stored forever, as in the feed, but is automatically deleted 24 hours after publication.
At the same time, boosting likes on Instagram is popular, including for content from Stories, why? The developers themselves explained this functionality as follows — Stories are necessary for the exchange of “short-lived” information that is not critical and there is no need to convey it to the maximum number of users. In a sense, this is your personal hosting, where you upload content to show it to your friends (one way or another — to a limited number of people).
Principle — laid out and forgot. And you don’t need to think about the need to delete information, because the system automatically cleans up Stories posts after 24 hours. For example, it may be a funny, but not very high-quality photo that you do not want to keep forever — you showed it to your friends, laughed together, and forgot — low-quality “momentary” content no longer clutters your memory.
Features of Instagram Stories — Shooting, Uploading, Processing, Settings, Views
Stories in the application are located at the top of the screen — they look like round user avatars and are hidden if you scroll down the feed. Please note that the “stories” are ranked not by the date they were added, but by the number of comments and playback cycles (views).
It is important not to forget about the specifics of ranking content in “Stories”, because if you find an interesting post in someone’s Stories and decide to read it later, this “later” may not come, because a popular post at the top of the list could have been added yesterday (and most likely — it is).
The promotion of reposts on Instagram about Stories is no less in demand than for posts in a regular feed, it’s just that the content has different goals here. Pages that represent stores or online courses often add promotions and discounts to Stories, which after 24 hours will no longer be relevant. Agree — this is technically convenient, and the promotion of reposts will allow you to quickly bring the necessary news to the top to get the maximum response from the target audience, and then you can safely forget about it.
But back to the functionality. To open a video in Stories, you need to tap on it, tap with hold pauses playback. Switching between “stories” is done by swiping to the right and to the left, each post must have the publication time indicated, which in the case of Stories is of particular importance.
Posts that have been read are grayed out and can be viewed again. Pay attention to an important nuance — you can comment on posts through Direct and comments are visible only to the author, and not to all users, as is the case with the feed. At first, users thought it was a bug, but it turned out that it was a non-trivial feature.
To create a “story” — click on the plus sign at the top and swipe to the right from the edge of the screen. Tap on the record button — photo, hold down tap — video (remember — up to 10 seconds!). You can also not shoot a new one, but choose something from the existing one — a swipe down will show all the photos and video materials from the gallery received over the last day.
Editing, as with any other photo or video content, privacy settings and statistics are also, in principle, obvious — you can hide a post from certain users and find out how many people have viewed it and who exactly. All this has an SMM side and a commercial aspect if we are talking about a commercial page for which services are ordered, such as cheating comments on Instagram to increase the ranking of content.
User reaction to Stories
At first, everyone took Stories with hostility, because this is an obvious copy from Snapchat. Against the background of the bugs on Instagram, the release of the clone functional seemed to many, to put it mildly, a strange decision.
However, Instagram Stories subsequently took root, and now almost a quarter of all content is laid out in Stories. Also, as we have seen, the function is also useful for the pages being promoted.
