Aside from the Feed, Instagram Stories are the main platform to showcase your message to your audience. With its vertical screen at 15 seconds cut-off, it can be tricky to create and display your content on Instagram Stories. It is also often a concern that Instagram Stories disappear after 24 hours, allowing less time for you to increase your Instagram engagement. In this article, we’ll share a few facts that will help you with your Instagram Stories engagement.

Why Instagram Stories?

The Story format is a highly celebrated feature on Instagram, in fact, it has been emulated in many different social media platforms including Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. It allows you to post more candid and more current content as the live period of these stories is only 24 hours. At the same time, you can save your Instagram Stories to highlight, allowing you to show off posts featuring your products, Instagram Influencers, and more. Instagram Stories are also a great platform where you can link your products or take your followers to your site which can be established by choosing the best web hosting service.

 

Facts about Instagram Stories

 
How Often Should You Post Instagram Stories?

Instagram can hold up to 100 stories in one account within 24 hours, this allows you to post as many stories as you want, or as little as you want. However, when it comes to engagement, it’s best to keep your stories to 5 stories daily. According to research by Socialinsider and Wave.video, your Instagram engagement is most optimum with 5 Instagram stories per day to ensure a retention rate of 70%. However, most brands actually post 7 to 8 stories a month.

The same research also indicates that most users exit stories after viewing the third story. This gives you an idea of how to arrange your stories. You might want to keep the ones that are most important in the first three stories. Alternatively, this challenges you to make your stories interesting enough in the first three posts to keep people watching. This kind of strategy also will have a good result with a good Instagram story template. 

Is Video Better Than Photos for Instagram Stories?

According to research, this is mostly true. When studying 64,571 Instagram Stories Ads, Socialinsider and Wave.video found that video content has lower tap forward and exit rates, meaning that users are more likely to engage with video stories than those of images. However, the split between the two isn’t as big. The research shows that 52% of video stories outperform image stories.

However, it is shown that video stories drive more conversations. More comments or replies are given to Instagram stories with videos, regardless of their followers’ number. In terms of Click Through Rate (CTR), video stories advertisements also outperform images with 0.59% CTR in comparison to 0.29% of stories.

How Does Follower Count Affect Your Instagram Engagement?

The same study shows that irrespective of reach rates, Instagram accounts with a lower number of followers tend to have less engagement. The highest average reach rate for smaller accounts (under 5,000 followers) is 9.54% while accounts with 100,000 followers only reach an average of 3.92% of followers.

However, the exit rates of smaller accounts tend to be bigger. Smaller brands with under 10,000 followers have an average exit rate of 6.37% and can be as high as 7.32%. Comparatively, the average exit rate of brands with a higher number of followers is 4 - 5%.

Conclusion

The Instagram Story is a potential platform to grow your brand, whether your account is a commerce business or an influencer account who'd like to increase engagement and send links of affiliate marketing products. Whatever your purpose is, a high engagement is necessary to ensure maximum efficacy.