Why you should be using Instagram Stories to drive sales and grow your brand presence.

Instagram stories are a crucial step in any business's social media strategy. The platform has now shown us that Instagram stories from a business profile will receive more views than a personal profile. This means that you have an opportunity to capture the attention of customers when they have time on their hands and are primed to buy.

We’ve listed 7 reasons why you should be posting multiple stories a day and how to effectively use them.

1. Visibility

Your followers are notified when you publish a new story on the home page with the colourful ring around your profile image. This makes your stories harder to miss than scrolling through the feed to see your latest post. Posting frequent stories also notifies Instagram's algorithm to place your post at the top of the feed as your profile is seen to be 'active'.

2. Instant Customer Feedback

Asking your follower's questions can be a great way to hone in on what they're interested in and how to better drive new products or services to fulfil these needs and interests. Just launched a new product? Post a sneak peek and get instant and honest feedback from your customers!

3. Web traffic

When you hit 10k followers you will have access to swipe up links to your webpage which will further drive followers, hopefully converting these ‘followers’ into customers.

4. Personality

Instagram stories are a great way to show the ‘in-between’ and less curated imagery. These might be ‘behind-the-scenes’ shots of a food photo shoot or sneak peeks of a new product that might be hitting the shelves.

As Instagram stories don’t need to look as stylized as your feed, this is a great opportunity to show images and videos of the team on-the-go and help people connect with you and humanize your brand.

5. Event marketing

Need to market your event last minute? Instagram stories might just encourage people to attend if you post a few sneak peeks of the event in action and invite people to come and join!

6. Front-of-mind

Instagram stories are a great way to be present and active in your potential customers' feeds. The more they see your content, the more inclined they will be to talk about you or even buy from you in the future.

7. Sales

Instagram stories are one of social media's biggest secret sales weapons as they keep your brand at the back of consumers' minds when you continuously post interesting and relevant stories.

Just remember "one-third of the most-viewed stories come from businesses, and one in five stories gets a direct message from its viewers." - according to Instagram internal data.