How To Make Instagram Story

 How To Make Instagram Story

How do Instagram Stories work?

When posting an Instagram Story, you can add stickers, time stamps, and doodles to each Story and apply certain filters and effects.

If your account is public, your Story is visible to anyone, but if your account is private, your Story is only visible to those who follow you.

Viewers have the option of directly responding to your Story via direct message (DM), liking it, or sharing it with their followers. You do have the option to disable replies in your app's settings.

You can also see who's viewed it by opening up your Story and swiping up on your screen.

Instagram Stories vs. Instagram Story Highlights

Instagram Stories is a feature that allows you to post ephemeral content available for up to 24 hours. Instagram Story Highlights are collections of saved Instagram Stories that live on a user's profile.

Brands and content creators often use Highlights to give their content a second life and add another element of curation to their profile.

It's a great place to share user-generated content, customer reviews, and FAQs - essentially anything that doesn't quite have a place in the feed but is valuable to your audience.

Learn how to create an Instagram Highlight here.

Why should you use Instagram Stories?

Instagram Stories can drive a ton of engagement and value — whether you're sharing a Story from a brand account or your own personal profile.

Instagram Stories have fueled the growth of brands like Anima Iris and Glamnetic.

Whether publishers are trying to grow brand awareness, grow traffic to videos or newsletters outside of Instagram, or share sponsored posts, Instagram Stories allows them to publish fun disappearing content that infuses brand voice and personality without taking up too much of the average user's dwindling attention span.

That's why Instagram Stories are so short and why they only last a short while on the platform.

As a blanket rule, the individual videos you add to your Instagram Story each have a maximum roll time of 15 seconds. If you add a one-minute video to your Instagram Story, for example, it will be broken up into 15-second segments.

How to View Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories appear at the top of your screen when you're on the Instagram mobile app.

Because they're often the first pieces of content users see when they open Instagram, these Stories can get a ton of engagement and help you advertise your regular Instagram photo gallery to more users.

Let's go over how you can view Instagram Stories.

1. Open Instagram and navigate to the home screen.

To start viewing Instagram Stories, open your Instagram mobile app and tap the home icon on the bottom-lefthand corner of your screen.

Once you've navigated to Instagram's home screen, you'll see a series of circular icons along the top, each of which represents the active Stories posted by the users you follow.

Your own Story is available for viewing on the far left of the Stories you follow.

2. Tap on a circular icon to view that user's Story.

Each circular icon you see at the top of your home screen will have a gradient circle around it, denoting that the user has recently posted a Story.

Tap on it to expand the user's Story — it will play automatically and go to the next user's Story.

3. Tap left and right to explore a user's story.

A single Instagram Story can contain numerous individual photos and videos strung together in the order it was shared.

To see earlier Stories, tap the screen on the left. To see recent Stories, tap on Ithe right. You'll see Stories organized from oldest to newest.

If you want to skip some Stories, you can easily do so by tapping to the right.

4. Use an Instagram Story viewer to view Stories privately.

Did you know that you can use a third-party tool to view Stories without the user knowing?

You might want to do this if you're scouting freelancers and don't want them to see you first. Some Story viewers allow you to autosave copies of the Stories, while others will offer a paid option so you can automatically save copies of new Stories.

Inflact is one of those apps - Stories are available on the web, you don't need to download an app. You can search for any username, and copies of the Stories posted from that username will pop up.