Lessons

Lesson Info

Instagram Stories

Let's talk about Instagram stories. The first thing I wanna say is that some of you might be familiar with Snapchat. Instagram stories is essentially Instagram's version of Snapchat, they basically adopted the same features and functionality of Snapchat and brought it over to their platform. And for those of you who aren't too familiar with it, Snapchat and Instagram are, they're virtually identical in form and function. They are what is called ephemeral media. So it's temporary. Whatever you create in either app is, well, in either Snapchat or Instagram stories, is not meant to last forever. It's meant to be either sent directly to somebody and then disappear, or replayed once or twice and then disappear, or show for 24 hours and then disappear. So for those of you who've been using Instagram stories, you've seen that they show up, they live there at the top of your app, and I'll show that in detail, they live at the top of your app for a little while. Once you watch it, it kind of go...

es away. You can watch it again if you want for 24 hours, and then after that it's gone, unless that person puts it into their highlights. I think that what has happened is that Snapchat and Instagram, I mean Snapchat was developed for an entirely different reason, and it has really shaped and shifted communication these days, so now we're using this as more of like a communication tool, but instead of just a conversational back and forth and everything disappears, we now want some of that stuff to last a little bit longer, especially because a lot of us creatives and business owners are putting a lot of time and effort into these stories, and we don't want them to just be gone in a puff of smoke after 24 hours. If we're putting all that time into them, we want them to last for a while. So now they're adding things like highlights on your Instagram profile so that you can make those Instagram stories last and show up for longer than 24 hours if you want. The advantage of using Instagram stories over Snapchat is that really, if you're starting from brand new, like if you've never used either of them but you already have Instagram, chances are you already have a little bit of an audience to pull from. So you're not starting from scratch. You already have this built-in audience. And then separately, with Snapchat, it's not easy to go through and find other people to follow. You actually have to know their username or you have to be next to them and get their Snap code or whatever. With Instagram, you can just kind of browse whoever or whatever, you can discover people the way that I've talked about earlier and see whether or not they're posting to their story and then follow them there, and then their story just gets added to your timeline of stories to watch. Instagram stories now have about twice Snapchat's daily active users. So in other words, Instagram stories is much more popular than Snapchat. Essentially... I mean, Instagram basically, with its invention of stories like pulled the rug out under Snapchat's feet, because it's adopting some of that same functionality. So of course people who already have, I mean, probably eight out of the 10 people, eight out of 10 people I know have abandoned Snapchat in favor of Instagram because why not have it all combined into one app instead of having to use two different apps and having to build an audience separately on each platform? If you want to, you can still use both, but I would recommend avoiding redundancy. So, for a long time, and it's less the case now, 'cause I've also become one of those people who's abandoned Snapchat at this point, but for a long time I was trying to post on both. So what I would do is, I preserved Snapchat because it was a smaller audience. I preserved that for like friends and family, private moments that I would be okay with everybody seeing. But on Instagram, my audience is much larger. So I don't necessarily wanna show like too much of the inside of my home or you don't get to see me laying in bed with my dogs. Like, maybe some of that is not, like some of the more personal moments don't get shared on Instagram stories. So for a long time, Snapchat was the personal stuff, and Instagram stories was more of the, like, I'm teaching a CreativeLive, I'm going to the museum today, look at these inspirational artists, or I'm out traveling the world, seeing and doing these really interesting, inspirational, cool things. So I would kind of differentiate it in that way, and Snapchat was just like, really silly overall. In looking at the two apps from the get-go, Snapchat really encourages sharing, and Instagram really encourages consuming. So the reason I say that is because when you first open Snapchat, what you see is the camera. You can start capturing immediately once you open the app. But when you open Instagram, you see the feed. You see what other people have posted, so you can scroll through all the photos, or you can scroll along the top and look at everybody's stories or tap into any of the stories that you actually wanna watch. So. That's really just a decision that's been made by each of those platforms about what's more important, what they think their users want or should be doing using their app. Instagram stories, sometimes I teach this, and people have no idea what I'm talking about. So if you're new to Instagram, this is what you see, so this is a screenshot, this is not my dog, this is a friend's dog, but. What you see is your feed, when you first open Instagram, and along the top you'll see these little user photos, these profile photos, and around them is a little colored circle. And that colored circle basically indicates that they have a story that you can watch. They've produced something and posted it on their story within the last 24 hours. So you can literally tap in and watch this story, and it'll auto-play basically through all of them if you want it to. You can tap through to make them go faster, you can tap back to make them go back, or you can close it to get out of them if you want. Your own personal one is the first one you see when you open the app. And if you tap into it, it will show you what you have posted. So this is a screenshot that I did of, these are my dogs. And if you, if you do, so if you tap into your story, you get to see what you've posted, and it has all these analytics, too, so it'll tell you how many people have seen your story, if you've posted, if you've tagged any people or used any hashtags, it'll tell you how many people have tapped into those. If you have a business account or a large account or a verified account, you can also share a link, so you can say, my dogs were featured in a blog post by this company. If you're interested in reading it, swipe up, and it'll take you directly to that article. If I'm promoting a workshop, for example, I can say, hey my class at CreativeLive has been released, swipe up for the link, and you can go watch that class on CreativeLive. So let me do a little tutorial. So when you're in Instagram, when you first open it up, you get your feed, and if you swipe to the right, it will open your camera. It's a little tricky, 'cause the exposure is brighter behind you, the light's bright behind you. So when you're here, you can decide whether or not you want to capture a photo or a video. It'll default to normal setting, so that's what we're gonna focus on right now. If you wanna take a photo, obviously, the same thing as your normal camera, you just tap to take the photo. I'm gonna get rid of that. If you wanna take a video, you press and hold, and you'll get a little red progress bar that goes around the circle. So I'm gonna make a little story. Where I scan the room, and you guys can see my students. Okay. So now I have this story. And from here, I can decide what I wanna do. So do I wanna write text on it? So I can say, in, let's see, I'll do, I'll write, doing an IG story demo. Doing an IG story demo, I can choose my font. So I can change the font if I want. I can make it bigger or smaller, drag it to where I want it to be. I get these little points that show me these lines along the edge that show me if I'm centered or not. So I'm gonna drag it down to the bottom. I'm also gonna do a location tag, so I'm gonna say, I'm at CreativeLive. So CreativeLive, San Francisco. What that enables me to do, it actually, the cool thing about that and the reason I would suggest using those is because they are not only tappable, but they add your feed, kind of like a hashtag, they add your post into this like, city-wide or location-wide story for that space. So this, CreativeLive, San Francisco story could go into like the overall San Francisco story for a short while. I think it's working with so much content that it doesn't necessarily, it doesn't put everybody's in there, of course, and it doesn't show for very long. So you might get like, 25 extra viewers or something like that, but it still helps with discoverability. I can say, actually, doing an IG story demo. I also wanna say, I wanna people tag them, I can also say @creativelive and mention them. Once I start typing somebody's username, if I type the @ symbol and start typing it'll auto-suggest people based on who I've tagged recently or who I'm following. So if it's live, it will be underlined. So that makes it tappable, so that CreativeLive will get pinged in their direct messages that I have mentioned them in a story, and then they can repost, now, that's a brand new feature, they can repost into their own story the video that I did. And then I can also do things like, add a hastag, like a branded hashtag, so we'll go all out and do CreativeLive everything on this post. Hashtag CreativeLive. And drag those. If you tap all of these things, it changes the colors. So yeah, let's just do, let's do rainbow, they did these new rainbow stickers and stuff for Pride Month, so that's kinda cool. I can add gifs, I can add any sort of stickers and emojis I want. But that's pretty good. Also, if you want, you can kind of slide right or left to go through the different color filters they have. Some of them are kind of cool. I usually like either one of the first two or three. So let's go with the second one. And then, if you are able to post a link, you would do it right up at the top by pulling down that link menu, typing it in. If it's a paid partnership, you can tag a business partner right there as well. So if you viewed stories and it's been like a paid sponsorship, you've probably seen a little tagline right under the username that says it's a paid partnership. And that is helpful on the business side, as well, so your partner can see the analytics as well. And the other thing that's important to mention is that you can actually mute the videos as well. So I might just mute this, 'cause I have no idea what I was saying when I made this video. You can also draw on it, that's the other thing I wanted to mention, you can like write all over it, or like circle to highlight anything. Or you can take a sticker and pin it on a specific person or take text and, like, if I had time, I could take each of your usernames and then pin those directly on you, so like when I pan, it'll pop up and pop up and pop up and pop up as I pan through, so it's kinda cool. I'll show you that later. But yeah, so when it's up and ready to go, should I do it, guys, should I just post it? You guys will be in my story, I hope that's good. So it'll show up in here. And then you can see, if you swipe up, it'll show that it's uploading. And then here's some stuff that I posted earlier, so you can see that it's already been uploaded, you can see some analytics about it, so how many people have seen it and tapped through, tapped any links I've put in there. This is one, so here, you can see I tagged the person who did my makeup, you can see that 10 people have tapped into her username. And then, if you go onto this side, oops, on this side, you can see all the people who have viewed it. So that's kinda cool.