8 best Instagram Story ideas and tips to engage your followers

Snapchat started it, and Instagram has gone further. I’m talking stories. Instagram Story is a fun way to let your followers know what you do daily. It stays there for 24 hours but brings in twice the traffic of your posts.

✅See also: 10 Best Instagram Analytics App to Track Performance

8 best Instagram Story ideas and tips to engage your followers

Sometimes stories become very dull, and you need to find creative ways to make them engaging. So here is your rescue, and here are our top Instagram Story Ideas and Hacks that will take your Instagram stories to the next level.

Rainbow color text

Content is undoubtedly an essential part of your story. They help you convey your message more clearly. Putting plain white text in your story makes it boring.

You will know the color tabs available on Instagram and the palette. You can access the entire color palette by long-pressing any color icon if you don’t have one. Using the color picker, you can choose any color from the color palette for the text.

To take the coloring game up a notch, you can also give your text a rainbow look or an ombre effect.

Enter your text in the story and select the whole thing. Now drag your finger along the left-to-right gradient while dragging your other finger from left to right across the text. This will give you the rainbow effect.

This can be undone when you choose any other color for the text. In iOS, you need to be careful because the effect will be undone as soon as you open the keyboard.

Attach your selfie

You can also attach your selfie to the original for a comic feel.

After you load your story, swipe up to access the stickers. Click the Camera icon displayed from the menu. This will open the front camera for you, and you can attach a small photo of yourself to the original post.

You can use the same trick to post your photo on some texture or wall. This can look like chat bubbles or messages on a billboard.

There are lots of creative ways to use this trick for your stories.

Text Pins

You’ve uploaded many videos on Instagram but definitely won’t notice the pin option. You can pin a sticker, profile link, or hashtag to an object.

Tap and hold the text you want to pin until you see this screen. This will open a slider. Slowly scroll through the slider to the point where your subject appears in the video. Place text on an object and click pin.

Instagram will automatically track subject movement and pin text to the object. This takes your storytelling skills and creativity to another level.

You can also use this to introduce a summary of your story.

Custom Apps for Stories

Instagram recently introduced a lot of options when it comes to stories. But sometimes, you feel like you need to push through those choices. This is when you should start using 3rd party apps.

The app that I recommend for stories is Open. It’s free and available for both iOS and Android.

They have a set of pre-designed templates that you can use to add photos and text before uploading them to their Story. Attach your pictures to them, giving a different feel to the story. Have a look for yourself.

If you don’t like the free templates, there are many that you can buy for a one-time nominal fee of $2. Unfortunately, Unfold does not support videos.

Instagram offers only 5 typefaces: Strong, Classic, Modern, Neon, and Typewriter. If you want more text styles beyond these 5, you can try CoolFancy Text Generator.

Go to the website and enter the text you want. It will generate a lot of text styles for the text template. Simply copy the text and paste it into your stories. This adds an interesting twist to your story.

Post Teaser

If you’re a social media influencer and you want to build hype for your upcoming project or post, there’s a neat little Instagram Story trick to do it.

Load your story and then click the paintbrush icon. Select the transparent brush, then tap and hold anywhere on the screen. It will fill the entire screen with a transparent white. You can also choose a color for the transparent layer from the color picker.

This can also act as a trailer or preview for your posts. You can add your title on it and then post in the next story.

Use handwritten text!

I cannot stress enough the importance of texts and what gives them a personal touch are handwritten texts.

You can buy cheap stylus pens from Amazon. The stylus works better than your finger.

Go to the brush menu and select the solid brush. Use your pen or hand to write on the image.

This gives a personal touch to stories that cannot be easily copied by others.

3D . Text Effects

This trick requires a little extra effort.

Once you’ve entered text, select the entire text. Copy and paste it on the screen. Change the color of the duplicate text to black.

Carefully place the original text on top of this black copy layer. This gives the text a pseudo 3D effect . You can also call it shadow effect .

Use Hashtags!

Hashtags help your story get noticed by a wider audience. Say, if you use #summer, your post will be featured in Instagram’s hashtag search page.

Even so, sometimes hashtags don’t fit the picture. You can smartly hide it by changing the color of the hashtag to be the same as the background color.

Here’s how you do it. See also: 10 Useful Tools to Increase Instagram Click Through Rate

Which one do you like?

Instagram is constantly adding stories so it’s hard to keep track of everything. These tricks are sure to give a new look to your Instagram profile. Let me know in the comments, which one do you like best?

✅See also: 12 Best Free Instagram Analytics App to Boost your Business!