Instagram stories are the latest growth trend in social media marketing.
These portrait photos (or 15 second videos) stay up for just 24 hours, giving you the perfect window of opportunity to promote your club, research, engage and entertain your followers.
There’s even the ability to ‘go live’ and livestream your content (if you are brave enough)!
You can also link this content to upload automatically to your Facebook stories.
Followers are able to react to your stories using emojis, or reply appearing as a direct message.
There is the opportunity to get maximum results through organic content, or create paid story ads to that will allow you to have a wider reach.
Instagram stories are a great way to showcase your club’s offering, as well as promoting new menus and events.
Need more reasons to hop on the bandwagon?
Over 500 million Instagram accounts use Instagram stories every day, with one-third of the most viewed Instagram stories from businesses.
Here’s our top 6 tips for maximising Instagram stories.
1. Highlights
Story highlights are where you can save your ‘instastories’ allowing them to appear at the top of your profile. You can label each highlight and organise your stories so that followers can easily find them. This is a great opportunity to showcase your club and the offers you provide.
Below are some examples of the great ways some clubs are utilising their highlights!
2. Branding
Instagram aids you in building brand awareness and this should be carried through to your stories.
Use your brands colours, font, logos and you can even create your own gifs.
Insider Trick – to access a wider palate of colours, when choosing colour for your font or pen, hold your finger down on any colour and a wide range and different shades will appear at the bottom of the screen (but make sure you hold your finger down until you are on the shade you want!)
3. Behind the scenes
A proven method in building rapport with your existing and potential followers is to share exclusive ‘behind the scenes’ content.
This often allows followers to feel a part of your club and build the connection. Some examples of behind the scenes content could even be as simple as an office tour, a quickfire questions to staff or a sneak peak at new menus or drink specials.
4. User generated content
A super-efficient and effective way to create content on your Instagram stories is to share your follower’s posts (User Generated Content).
This is as simple as resharing posts your club has been tagged in, or sharing content of accounts you follow or work with.
Below, Coolangatta Surf Club has reposted content that they have been tagged in from a follower’s story. Not only is this effortless content, it also promotes their great review!
5. Engagement
People love having their opinions heard!
Instagram stories allows you to create this instant engagement, using a number of templates and stickers.
Clubs can utilise this to their advantage through the use of polls and questions, giving you instant responses from your followers.
You are then also able to share the results and respond to the questions publicly on your stories.
You can also create countdown timers for events or new releases. These can be accessed through the ‘create’ tab on the bottom of the screen when making your story.
6. Swipe up
When you hit the big 10,000 followers (and have your account verified with that magic blue tick), you are rewarded with option to add a swipe up link to your stories.
Followers can literally ‘swipe up’ and be immediately taken through to the relevant and corresponding website, app or blogpost.
This is an effective way to make the most of your presence on Instagram as it leads to more clicks and conversions. You can monitor the Story swipe ups in your Instagram insights.
In the below example, Sandstone Point Hotel has used their swipe up link to promote their Father’s Day event.
This makes purchasing tickets much easier for patrons. It is also useful to promote other offerings from your venue, such as linking through to your dining reservation system, loyalty programs and membership pages.
Add a few gifs, a call to action and you are good to go!
Hungry for more. Head over to the Instagram stories page to find out more.
About the author
Grace Boothman is an experienced hospitality marketing professional. She has worked in operational and marketing roles for some of Queensland’s leading clubs.