Don’t have an idea of what Instagram stories are? Stories are a way in which you can share photos and videos as a complete “Story” which are visible to your followers on Instagram. Instagram Stories are ephemeral, which means they disappear after 24 hours. The platform allows users to share them with others, and for people to comment in return.
Here are a few compelling reasons why you should be paying attention to Instagram Stories:
- Instagram Stories are used by 500 million users every day
- One-third of the most-viewed Instagram Stories are from businesses
- 80 percent of accounts on the image-based social media channel follow a business on Instagram.
As you can see, Instagram Stories have quickly grown to become one of the most important elements of a brand’s successful Instagram strategy. Your customers are using Instagram Stories, and to reach them you should be there too. If you are ignoring Stories you are missing opportunities to reach and engage with your customers.
In my experience, many companies are not adequately tracking Instagram Stories analytics, because to do it natively within the platform requires a lot of manual work. In this post, I am going to tell you what Instagram Stories are, why your brand should be using them, and how you can use Talkwalker Analytics to track your results and prove your ROI.
How can Instagram Stories benefit a brand?
Instagram Stories can benefit a brand in a number of different ways.
- Stories allow a brand a great deal of creativity to tell their story. The tools available for Stories in the platform provide almost limitless creativity. Also, if you have video editing skills you can take your creativity to new levels by creating unique custom content with programs like Adobe Premier and After Effects.
- The ability to create quick and engaging content on Instagram Stories allows brands to react quickly without having to spend much time in production. The skills needed to produce engaging content are low, which allows brands to focus on what is important: telling their unique brand story.
- Stories provide an opportunity for a higher level of engagement with customers by allowing brands to interact on a more personal level. If you want to engage with your customers on a more authentic and personal level, Stories are an excellent way to do that.
- Using brand Influencers on Stories is proving to be a highly successful Stories strategy that many brands are using. Because of the authentic nature of Stories, using an influencer feels more natural and can be a powerful way to take your Instagram brand strategy to the next level. A number of brands are also having a celebrity or influencer take over the account for a day to create and share content on behalf of the company. We see this trend continuing to grow.
One company that I follow and think is using Instagram Stories extremely well is Nike. They post interesting content frequently, and show content from their influencers giving an authentic look at behind the scenes of the highest level of sport. Their recent Women’s World Cup stories, Nike Women’s Instagram account were especially well done, and deeply resonated with the values of the brand. Here are a few examples from the Nike Women’s Instagram account.
Talkwalker and Instagram Stories Analytics
Here at Talkwalker, we have developed some powerful, industry-leading reporting features for Instagram Stories. We believe it is important for our clients to understand the impact of their owned media efforts, especially on Instagram Stories. We support reporting in a few different ways.
1. We capture your Stories within our platform. Stories disappear after 24 hours, and while this is a great feature for consumers, it goes against what most brands want from a reporting point of view. We make it easy for you to look back and measure the effectiveness of your efforts by keeping a log of all your Stories after you have connected your Instagram account to Talkwalker.
2. We also keep your reporting data on Stories indefinitely. Instagram Insights only keep Stories reporting data for 14 days. While other niche dedicated Instagram platforms keep them for 3 months, with Talkwalker you can always look back at your results indefinitely. With these other platforms, you must pull your data before they expire or the data will be lost forever.
3. Deeper Analytics. When you connect your Instagram account to Talkwalker, you can combine your data with other social media analytics, to get a deeper view of your efforts beyond what you can get from within Instagram Insights. We have developed some additional reporting tools in order to rate the effectiveness of your Stories efforts. Drawing together on a number of key measures of success, we created an algorithm that rates the success of your Stories instantly. This tool gives you a quick idea of how effective your Stories have been and gives you insight into how you can improve your efforts.
4. Organizational Tools. We make it easy to organize and group your campaigns. You can categorize campaigns and then compare these categories next to each other. This is helpful when you are running regular marketing campaigns with many stories and you want to compare how the overall campaign did in comparison to another campaign. This makes reporting much easier and straight forward from a campaign point of view.
With all your key metrics in one place, you can monitor your Instagram channel effectively and efficiently.
Our Competitors
Most of our competitors have yet to offer full integration to the new Instagram API which launched at the end of 2018.
In review, there are three types of data that can be pulled from the Instagram API:
- Hashtag Tracking
- Business Account Monitoring
- Own Account Monitoring
Many of our competitors only offer the first type of data, Hashtag tracking, but not the Own Account Monitoring data that is needed to report on Instagram Stories.
We offer integration with all three types of data and provide the advanced tools to help you make sense of the data. We offered our integration shortly after the API changes and offer the most complete Instagram data insights of any company. Our tool will help you make sense of your Instagram Stories efforts.
Conclusion
At Talkwalker, we always seek to be at the leading edge of innovation and help our clients gain insight from their social data especially when it comes to Instagram. We remain committed to building world-class social listening tools for the platform.
Interested in Talkwalker Analytics for Instagram Stories? Sign up for your Free Demo now.
