Instagram Stories Tips – 11 Quick & Easy Tips + Hacks

1. Add images to Instagram Stories

Adding images to your stories is a little hack that can be used in many ways, either to create a more interesting poll, collage, or to add your logo to your Instagram Stories. You are able to add JPG images, PNG images with a transparent background, and even your own made GIFS. (See Tip 2 in our tutorial video below)

Step by step:

1. Create a new story
2. Go into your camera roll (phone’s photo gallery)
3. Select the photo you want to add
4. Search for the option ‘copy’ so you copy that photo
5. Go back into Instagram Stories and wait until you see a sticker/popup appear
6. Tap the sticker to add the photo to your story
7. Position the image wherever you want
8. You can repeat this step as many times as you like

Instagram Story Tips

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2. Template Apps for Instagram Stories

Creating Instagram Stories has to be fun for you as well, the creator. Use the following apps to achieve this.

Tezza – Vintage effects

The Tezza App is full of cool vintage film effects. With a few clicks, you instantly create a video shot that looks like it came straight out of the seventies.

Stop Motion
The stop motion function transforms a video as if it shows photos in succession which creates a cool vibe!

Maché

One of the easiest Instagram stories tips is: Use templates for Instagram Stories. Templates offer a great looking story within minutes! Our top favorite is Maché, it’s new (May 2019) and right now only available on iOS. The app offers a wide range of templates and beautiful typography.

Mojo

Mojo is similar to Unfold but it includes animations. Text animations, moving photos, swipe-up templates, and so many more options.

Adobe Lightroom

Sometimes it is great to edit the photos you post on your Instagram Stories. Use Adobe Lightroom with our Lightroom Presets to have a beautiful color edit within minutes.

3. Get creative within Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories is all about drawing someone’s attention within the first second. Put effort into making your stories eye-catching, funny, and interesting.

Create a text-shadow in Instagram Story

By layering text in two colors you give your text more dimension and depth. You basically create the same text twice and place them over each other in a slightly different position.

Step by step:

1. Create the message you want to put out and copy it
2. Create another text, paste the text you copied and give it a different color
3. Place the top text in a slightly different position from the shadow color text

Design with keyboard symbols

Did you know there are symbols hidden inside your keyboard that you can use as design elements? You can scale a simple wave or dot to any size so you don’t even note its original form.

Step by step:

1. Create a text in your Instagram story
2. On your keyboard, find the symbols like • or >
3. You can change the shapes by changing the fonts
4. Give it a color and size and make it even bigger by pinching and scaling
5. Rotate it and place it anywhere you like.

4. Instagram Stories Music Hack

Add music to your Instagram Stories, no matter what country you are in. The standard music sticker available in Instagram Stories doesn’t work in every country so here’s a little trick to get around that. (See tip 3 inside our tutorial video)

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Step by step:

1. Open one of your music apps on your phone like Spotify
2. Search for a part of music you want to your stories
3. Press play
4. Now go into your Instagram Stories camera and start recording
5. When finished, save the video
6. Now the music is playing under the video and ready to post on Stories

5. Summarize what you are telling

How many stories do you watch without having your sound turned on? You often find yourself watching stories in public areas and will probably have your volume turned off. Statistics say a huge part of your Instagram Story viewers is watching without sound.
A perfect way to directly draw the attention of your Instagram story viewers is by summarizing what you are saying in that same story.

6. Instagram Stories with a reason to follow

It is important to determine why people are following your Instagram account. In the case of our account @SaltinourHair; we are a source for travel, photography, and video inspiration. 

We try to post this as much as possible by applying one of the following Instagram stories tips:

• Share useful tips and behind the scenes.
  What did you just find out about the place you are traveling to? Or what is one of those camera tricks you always do? Share them!
• Add location tags to your stories so people know where your stories are taken.
• Create an actual storyline. For example; when hiking down a waterfall. Show them the difficulty of the trail, tell them about the duration of the hike, don’t be afraid to share real emotions.
• Give that story a cliffhanger by waiting a few hours before posting the actual shots of the waterfall. Just make sure it was worth the wait for your followers!

7. Add a time- or hyper-lapse

A hyper- or timelapse is a bunch of photos, pasted together into a video. It will add an interesting new view of a place you currently are.
Press record, point it to the sunset or walk from one point straight to another for at least 1-minute and you will have a cool video.

This is built-in the camera app from iOS devices. For Android, Framelapse is an app that does the same job.

8. Don’t over-story

People have a limited amount of time and patience and they probably don’t want to see 30 of new 15-second videos. Keep the rule of thumb, don’t post more than 4 or 5 stories at once. Post your remaining stories a few hours later. Nobody likes to see a ton of dashes on the top and if they do, they will actually click faster through your stories, which is bad for your conversion.

9. Draw People to your new Instagram Post

Let your followers know that you posted a new photo. Share the photo on Instagram Stories but don’t show them the entire photo. Give them a little teaser so they are interested in seeing the entire photo. Cover the photo with text, symbols or an image. See Tip 5 in our tutorial video at the top of this article for a detailed explanation.

10. Highlight your best Instagram stories

Your stories are something to be proud of and a source of inspiration. Why let them disappear after 24-hours? New people will visit your profile every single day, and having your absolute best stories sticky on top is the perfect advertisement. This first highlight could be anything from an ‘About Us’ to your most impressive story videos.

11. Upload high-quality videos to Instagram Stories

Your stories will look so much more stunning when you post a video of your larger DSLR or mirrorless camera. Creating these can be done in a lot of ways:

• You can either film everything vertically and hold your camera sideways.
• Or place your horizontal footage into a 9:16 video file.
• If you ever made a video for YouTube, upload that one to your stories too.

You can use Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. Export your video in a 9:16 ratio (for example: 1920×1080 pixels).
Once your video is ready, transfer it to your phone via Airdrop (Mac) or a cloud service like Google Drive and post it on Instagram Stories.

Here’s an example of one of our videos: