500 million people use Instagram Stories every day 😮 – yep that’s a stonking half a BILLION people swiping through so yes, stories are an important channel for your brand to maximise on.

Instagram stories have grown and grown and are set to grow some more as the horizontal scroll is fast taking over the vertical scroll for a lot of demographics, and, one third of the most viewed stories are from businesses.

The option to ‘swipe up’ for more info is an amazing tool, taking a fair few of these precious eyeballs straight to your page or website to move them towards the action that you want them to take, but that option is only automatic once you have 10,000+ followers!

However here are 5 ways that you can get that swipe up with less than 10K 

1- Add Shopping Stickers

If you have a physical product and an e-comm business this is a great (and FREE) way to gain more visibility. Adding shopping tags on Instagram will not only get you featured on the explore tab for added discovery and enable your followers to shop, but you’ll be able to edit your stories for the swipe up!

• You need to create a catalogue – I recommend using shopify and integrating from that 💖 – or you can manually set up a catalogue via Instagram. To do this go to settings>business>sign up for shopping. It’ll talk you through the steps!

• Then you need to submit this for approval…usually takes a couple of days

• Next step is to activate ‘shopping’ on Insta.

  • On your Insta home page go up to the menu > settings > business > shopping then select your catalogue and ‘done’

• It’s then really easy to start creating stories, have a play and add a product sticker – this will allow the swipe up redirecting your customers to view the product and hopefully make an easy purchase or at least find out more.

2 – @Mention hack

OK – technically this might not be a swipe up, it doesn’t redirect to a website but you can use this little hack as another FREE way to get people to click to your Insta home page

• Create a story

• Use the @mention to tag your own page

• Add a GIF sticker for a ‘tap here’ call to action

• Reduce the @mention until it’s barely visible and place it on the ‘tap here’ – when people tap they will be redirected to your insta home page

3- Get yourself on IGTV

📺 It can be daunting getting in front of the camera, but hey it’s free, it certainly pays off (and it gets easier the more you do it!)

IGTV is instagram’s answer to Youtube, so it’s all about the longer form videos, and when it’s estimated that in 2020 a whopping 80% of content will be video content, it’s a tool not to be underestimated!

If you’re using IGTV you can link to an external website within your description. So, it’s great for service based businesses to offer value through trainings, tips and advice – with that all important swipe to your website.

4- Promote a story

If you want to put a bit of budget behind things you have the additional options of either promoting a story or creating a paid story Ad.

For the former, you can promote an active or archived story, but if you are planning to do this you need to be mindful of the fact that it shouldn’t have any clickable links (@mentions/hashtags etc) but you can use a poll, countdown or quiz if you think they’ll work for your brand or objectives!

Stories can be up to 15 seconds long and if you are going to put money behind them for promo them make sure they have a strong call to action to make people swipe ☝️

Here’s how to do it:

Go to the live story and click on the 3 dots > promote > you can then decide where to send people, either your profile, your website or your DM’s.

You then create your audience – who you want it to reach – and your budget and duration > Next > Promote

5- Paid Story Ads

No prize for guessing that this my fave 😊 – you need budget for paid story Ads (but you do get more bang for your buck) …you get better targeting, advanced customisation and detailed results to work from!

You set up a paid story via Ads Manager and, whilst you might have to spend some money, you can also push the same message out on Facebook and Messenger within the same budget (and that’s got the potential to hit a big audience!)

Within Ads manager you have added customisation and targeting (see my post on the difference between promoting and paid Ads).

You’ll need to access Ads Manager via your Facebook page, create a new campaign and select stories as the placement. For more support with this get in touch.

Paid Ads will give you lots of feedback on what’s working so that you can tweak, test and refine.

In summary, don’t think that the swipe up is reserved for the 10K follower crew! Have a play and see where you get to.

If you’re still unsure book a power hour and I can help!

You’re going to need to make sure that you don’t just start a new blog post. You need to duplicate this post in order to retain the sidebar.

Don’t forget to include images and quotes to break your copy up a bit.