The Keys to Epic Engagement on Social Media

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It doesn’t get much better than a moment of delight on social media.

We love the brands who deliver these moments to customers (as customers of some of these brands, we particularly love when it happens to us). And we aim to deliver delight on a regular basis when we interact with Buffer customers online, too.

Social media engagement seems like a slam dunk strategy. Everyone should be doing it, right? But it certainly comes with its blind spots and questions.

Should you be replying to everyone?

How can you make sure you capture all your mentions?

What are the best ways to respond quickly?

In this post, we’ll run through some of the reasons why investing in engagement makes business sense, and we’ll touch on the specific tips and workflows to master engagement on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

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One of the quickest and easiest ways to set yourself apart on social media is simply to reply. If you reply to all your customers, all the time, with a helpful and happy response, then you’re really ahead of the curve.

That’s right, all it takes is engaging with the people who want to engage with you. You’ve probably heard this stat before: Eighty-eight percent of brands don’t respond to messages that need a reply. Really! You can be among that elite 12 percent, simply by engaging. 

We’d love to give you some tips on how to do just that. 

Before we get into the specifics for tools and workflows on the major social networks, let’s start by discussing some of the benefits and the “why” for social media engagement.

We want to help you get there. Here’s a guide on all things customer support and social media with dozens of tips that you can implement today and begin to delight your customers.

1. Social media engagement is public

With social media engagement, you will naturally amplify your brand’s voice and tone, plus you’ll have your interactions front-and-center before a larger audience. 

(DMs excluded.)

Think about some of the private interactions you have with your customers, like with traditional customer care channels like email, which are private, 1-to-1 interactions. But with social channels like Twitter, these interactions can be public — at least to start. Same goes for engaging with your audience in Instagram comments or Facebook reviews.

You’re already wow-ing your audience in other channels like email and live chat. 

With social media, the awesomeness you’re delivering is visible to everyone. 

Those amazing audience interactions that create strong word of mouth marketing for you are now amplified to a much larger audience.

Existing and potential customers get to see first hand that you’re responsive and actively supporting your products or services. 

2. Social media engagement is fast and focused

You can deliver delight very fast and in a focused way, chatting with your audience about specific topics and campaigns or helping solve particular problems that they’re facing. 

With a focus on the short ‘n sweet, something magical happens:

• The barrier to entry for your audience drops dramatically. They have an easy way to converse with you, anytime. 
• Focused and specific topics mean you can reply faster and engage deeper. We love diving into a marketing conversation with our audience members in a Twitter thread or helping answer questions in a DM
• And one big factor that affects the bottom line — Faster responses equal happier customers, which equals more ROI. Research shows faster responses actually generate revenue for brands.

Because of its fast and friendly nature, social media is often preferred over other channels of getting in touch. And the more you respond quickly to your audience, the better they’ll learn that social media — Instagram, Facebook, Twitter — are great places to connect directly with your brand. 

3. Social media is where your customers are. You can achieve a huge scale of engagement by being responsive on social media. 

At Buffer, a vast majority of our audience is on social media throughout the day. It’s where they’re at and where it often makes the most sense for them to reach out and get in touch. 

We have more than 1,000 conversations a week on social media!

We imagine that there might be a large volume of social conversations happening for you, too. People spend an average of nearly four hours a day consuming media on a screen. And a growing percent of that viewing happens on smartphones and apps.

That’s a lot of eyeballs on screens. 

Social media channels provide an easy outlet for customers to switch from browsing to chatting at a moment’s notice. More and more those chats are pointed toward brands on social where customers are beginning to expect quick answers to their problems and authentic engagement with their conversations.

One of the best ways we’ve found to make sure you catch all these conversations is to use a social media engagement tool. There are a lot of great ones out there. We’ve built one at Buffer called Buffer Reply, which you can check out at buffer.com/reply. 

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Getting the most out of Facebook & Instagram engagement

The biggest social networks in the world live under the Facebook umbrella, and brands that make great use of their Facebook Page and Instagram profile can create wonderful experiences for their audience.

It all begins with getting set up correctly. Let’s start with Instagram.

1. Fill out your contact information completely

You want to show people that you are committed to being there for them on social, and one way to do that is to put in the time to create a complete profile. This includes the obvious bits like profile picture and description. By the way, we did a whole episode on Instagram bios just a couple weeks ago if you scroll back through our podcast archives.

But beyond those basics, we also highly recommend filling out the finer details like category, location, and contact information. This shows your audience that you’re willing to engage with them in any way that works best for them — whether it be through a DM, through a reaction to a Story, or through email or in-person.

The same advice holds true for your Facebook Page. Spend the time to fill out everything completely, including your profile picture, cover photo, and About section. But also making sure that all your contact information is listed. 

As a bonus tip, if you’re actively engaging with people on these networks, then those interactions are likely to be quite easily visible whenever someone visits your page. You can see the replies to things like Facebook posts, and you can scroll through Instagram comments. If you notice that a brand is jumping into the comments to answer questions and share emojis, then you’re likely to leave with a positive feeling about that brand!

2. Take full advantage of social engagement features

The other major tip we want to share about engaging on Instagram and Facebook is to take advantage of some of the new features that both networks are rolling out to manage conversations even easier. There’ve been a lot of neat announcements recently. You might have heard about Threads, a new standalone app from Instagram that is intended for private, 1:1 conversations. It remains to be seen exactly how brands might use this tool, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.

What’s more immediately clear is the way that Facebook hopes to unite its messaging for businesses into a centralized inbox. Currently, you can manage Messenger and Instagram DMs through your Facebook Page, and Facebook has added even more functionality just this last week, including the capability of: 

• Adding labels to contacts, like ‘VIP’ and ‘New Customer’ 
• Using saved replies to streamline responses for common questions
• and Setting up instant replies and away messages, which you can schedule to be sent at different times

Also on the horizon: Instagram DMs might be coming to desktop soon. Currently you can only access these through the mobile app.

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Getting the most out of Twitter engagement

Twitter is an especially effective customer support and success channel that can be scaled much easier than traditional phone or email support channels. It’s fast and effective for your customers, and it’s speedy and efficient for your social media team.

Like with Instagram and Facebook, it helps to get the profile set up completely. Specifically for Twitter, it can be great to add support hours to your Twitter account profileTwitter makes it incredibly easy to include your support hours directly on your Twitter profile. This helps set response time expectations with customers which is crucial.

Similarly, you can enable the‘Provides Support’ label to let customers know that your Twitter account provides support by quickly enabling this option. 

One small tweak that we highly recommend making on Twitter is allowing anyone to send you a Direct Message. You can reduce friction by allowing anyone to send you a private Direct Message as opposed to the normal flow where a you and your customer must follow each other in order to DM. This would encourage more conversation with your audience.

Universal tips for social media engagement

1. Add team member signatures to replies.

Even if it’s just one or two people replying on your social handles, signatures are a great way to make your customers’ experience that much more personal. It can even help reinforce a sense of continuity of care.
You can add this manually into each message, or this can be automatically added if you use a social media support tool like Buffer Reply. 

And if you’re not sure what to use for a signature, we’ve found that common conventions include appending first names or initials next to things like hyphens or carats.

2. Use a social media inbox

Ok, we’ve mentioned tools like Buffer Reply a few times now, and for good reason: when it comes to social media monitoring, it’s very important to capture all your brand mentions. Third-party tools like Reply can make this much easier. 

Ideally, with social media monitoring, you’ll want to get all

• @mentions`
• all direct messages, of course
• but also all the times when your brand is referenced on social outside of a direct outreach

By setting filters and searches in these tools, you can ensure that you capture it all and respond to every conversation that needs it.

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How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Heather-Mae on Twitter
• Dave on Twitter

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

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About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

Thank The Keys to Epic Engagement on Social Media for first publishing this post.

News Roundup: The Future of Facebook, Pinterest’s Latest Changes, the Most Popular Stories, and More

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As ever, a ton is happening in the world of social media, and it can be hard to catch every story.

So we want to highlight some of the biggest news items from recent weeks that might impact your social media marketing.

We’ll touch on Facebook’s most recent product changes and strategic plans, how Pinterest continues making splashes with its business and shopping features, and the latest data on social media trends and usage. Learn what’s coming next to Instagram and find out what’s more popular: Facebook Stories, Instagram Stories, or Snapchat.

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Social media news item #1

The Future of Facebook (new audio from Mark Zuckerberg)

The Verge — a technology and culture news website — released two hours of leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg talking to his Facebook employees, answering questions about Facebook’s future, the risks it faces, and the strategies for things like privacy, reliability, and even Libra, Facebook’s new cryptocurrency.

The audio was a very sincere Zuckerberg talking openly and genuinely with his team. It was a side of him you don’t alway see in public forums.

What we found particularly interesting — and relevant to social media marketers — was his thoughts on Facebook strategy. 

At one point he started talking about Facebook’s response to a threat like TikTok, which has exploded in popularity recently. If you’ve yet to try it, TikTok is a social media app for sharing videos; it’s become especially popular with younger demographics.

Zuckerberg related TikTok to the Explore tab on Instagram, saying:

It’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram,  which is today primarily about feed posts and highlighting different feed posts. I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for stories, and that were the whole app.

So what will Facebook do about TikTok? 

It appears that Instagram is best positioned to compete with TikTok, and Zuckerberg mentioned that they’ll be making some changes to Instagram, including changes to the Explore tab so it’s more focused on Stories.

That’s a good takeaway for marketers. We already know that Stories are an incredibly popular way to reach your audience — you can check out last week’s episode on Stories examples and ways to schedule Stories with Buffer. 

The fact that Instagram might make Stories even more discoverable feels like even more reason to build Stories into your marketing strategy.

And one other tidbit worth keeping an eye on: Zuckerberg mentioned that Facebook has built a TikTok-like app and is currently testing it in countries like Mexico, where TikTok has yet to be released. The app is called Lasso — Facebook is trying to find product-market fit with the app before bringing it to other countries to compete directly with TikTok.

(Not long after the audio came out, Facebook responded by livestreaming an internal Q&A session at Facebook.)

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Social media news item #2

Like counts might be going away on Facebook, too

You’ve heard about likes going away on Instagram — perhaps you’ve even experienced it already. 

Well, the same thing is going to happen with like counts on Facebook.

Facebook is officially starting to hid like counts on its posts, starting first in Australia. Just like with the removal of likes on Instagram, with Facebook likes, the posts’s author can still see the count, but it’s hidden from everyone else who sees it. People can see who liked it but not how many people liked it. Same goes for the Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry reactions.

There’s been a lot of positive press about these changes for Instagram and Facebook, especially as it related to people’s well-being and experience on social media. There’s less social pressure for a post to perform to a certain threshold — less envy, less competition.

And to be clear, these hidden like counts are still being treated as tests. A Facebook spokesperson told Techcrunch, “quote”“We are running a limited test where like, reaction, and video view counts are made private across Facebook. We will gather feedback to understand whether this change will improve people’s experiences.” unquote.

The thinking is that if the test improves people’s well-being without affecting engagement or activity with Facebook, then it’s likely to keep rolling out to more and more countries.

We wrote on the Buffer blog about this shift away from like counts and what it might mean for marketers. 

Our take is that it signals a move toward attention metrics, which marketers have already been tracking and optimizing for some time now. In fact, I’d venture to say that marketers were ahead of the curve on this shift away from likes.

You’re right. Many social media dashboards now report on these more informative attention metrics, like

• Completion rate for Stories
• Video watch time and audience retention
• Referral traffic and attribution
• Engagement rate (total interactions divided by reach)

These give you a great signal of whether or not your content is working and keeping people engaged. It’s much clearer data than an ambiguous response of a like.

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Social media news item #3

Pinterest debuts catalog uploads and new business profile features

All year long, Pinterest has been releasing a ton of great value to businesses and advertisers through new features on the app. The company went public earlier this year and continues to grow, most recently surpassing 300 million monthly active users.

What caught our eye with Pinterest’s most recent moves was its addition of more business features and e-commerce features with catalogues, profiles, and shopping.

Let’s start with the catalogs.

As of a couple weeks ago, if you’re an e-commerce company, you can upload your full catalog to Pinterest and automatically turn all your products into shoppable product pins. This feature was first rolled out to select partners in European countries and is likely to expand further as shopping season nears. 

The interesting signal that this news tells me is just how committed Pinterest is to creating an awesome shopping experience on the app. 

You’re right. We’ve seen similar with Instagram Checkout, which lets you buy directly in the app. It feels like both Pinterest and Instagram are moving in the same e-commerce direction. If your brand sells to consumers online, then these two social networks will be key places for you. 

In addition to catalogs, Pinterest also debuted new dynamic business profiles with video cover images and a dedicated Shop tab. 
We’ll share a couple examples of these new profiles in our show notes at buffer.com/podcast so you can check them out. I think they look fabulous.

The new Shop tab is one of my favorite new parts of the profile. It’ll appear just under the main cover image and description, next to the options for Activity and Community.On the Shop tab, you’ll see a list of “Shop the Look” pins for your brand, even sorted into collections. The Ulta Beauty account is a great example — they have collections for things like Nail Polish, Eye Makeup, and Accessories.

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Social media news item #4

Which is most popular: Stories on Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat?

Survey says: Facebook. (!?)

This news comes from our friends at HubSpot who recently shared some interesting findings on the popularity of Stories. 

Their survey showed that 70 percent of people prefer to watch Facebook Stories over Instagram Stories or Snapchat.

Isn’t that result suprising?

Now, before you go out and change your whole social media strategy, let me share a bit more context. The data had a small sample size — 275 people — and the demographics were a broad set of consumers in the United States alone. 

So had the survey been larger or more focused on a segment like 18-24 year-olds or even 25-34-year olds, we might have seen different results.

Nevertheless, the fact that Facebook Stories scored so highly in this survey is a surprise … especially when you consider that Facebook Stories are mostly an afterthought in many marketing articles and strategy conversations. 

From my point of view, this data made me think twice about Facebook Stories as a viable channel. 

It’s definitely hard to ignore the reach and size of Facebook in general, so it makes sense that its Stories might be visible to an equally large number of people. And especially if Facebook Stories are talked about less than, say, Instagram Stories or Snapchat, it feels like competition might be a bit less, too, and you’ll have more chance to stand out.

Right, and the HubSpot article even goes on to describe some easy ways to test the water on Facebook Stories. A lot of companies take the lean approach: They simply cross-post the same content from instagram Stories to Facebook Stories. 

Doesn’t get much simpler than that!

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Lightning round

Pinterest has a dark mode now!

You can toggle on the dark mode in the Pinterest app. I know a lot of people love this for the way it saves their eyes. Even more good news, there’s a dark mode for Gmail now, too.

New Twitter timelines are here.

You can now use Twitter lists as alternate Twitter home feed timelines. You can pin up to five lists to your main screen then swipe back and forth to see them.

We’re huge fans of Twitter lists here at Buffer, so this feature has been a real hit.

Instagram announced the release of Threads.

Threads is a new camera-first messaging app to connect you with your friends. People are calling it another way that Instagram has taken inspiration from some of the features that Snapchat has built successfully. We’re eager to see how it performs for Instagram.

“Following Activity” goes away.

Also, Instagram recently changed its app so that you can non longer see“Following Activity” tab where it would show you the activity — likes, comments, etcetera — of the people you followed.

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How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Heather-Mae on Twitter
• Dave on Twitter

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

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About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

Thank News Roundup: The Future of Facebook, Pinterest’s Latest Changes, the Most Popular Stories, and More for first publishing this post.

Instagram Stories: How 18 Brands And Influencers Are Using It (And You Can Too!)

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10 billion.

That’s the number of videos people watch on Snapchat every day. The same potential consumption (maybe more) exists for Instagram Stories —  quick videos and photos that disappear after 24 hours, just like Snapchat, but with an audience of 500 million users.

Does that sound like a channel worth exploring?

We believe so! Storytelling has always been a key part of marketing, and features like Instagram Stories are empowering us marketers to tell better and deeper stories about our brands. We’d love to provide you with more resources about Instagram Stories so that you can master this platform and see your voice spread.

In this post, I’d love to share 18 Instagram marketers who have been doing rad things with Stories to give you some inspiration on what you could do for your Instagram Stories too.

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Now you can also plan and schedule Instagram Stories directly within Buffer, on web or on mobile. Try it now for free. 

18 Creative Uses of Instagram Stories (and how you can do it too)

From my research, I discovered several creative ways brands and individuals have been using Instagram Stories. And here’s the great news: most of these strategies do not require huge budget or resources to pull off!

Before we dive into each brand and individual, here’s the full list of rockstar Instagram storytellers with links to their Instagram profiles.

(Note: If you end up following some of these great accounts and wish to see their Instagram stories from a desktop browser, there’s a neat Chrome extension here which lets you do just that.)

1. NASA
2. LOFT
3. Huffington Post
4. Techcrunch
5. Gary Vaynerchuk
6. Chris Burkard
7. New York University
8. GoPro
9. When I Work
10. Shopify
11. Remote Year
12. Black Sheep Cycling
13. Olympics
14. Brian Fanzo
15. Minaal
16. 9gag
17. Sean McCabe
18. TrackMaven

Without further ado, let’s take a closer look at how each of the following brands and individuals uses Instagram Stories and see how you might take inspiration to adapt their strategies for your own brand!

1. NASA (@nasa)

Supplement your main Instagram content with bonus info via Stories

This is one of my favorite ways of using Instagram Stories: telling a deep story behind each and every Instagram post.

One of the key differences between Instagram and Snapchat is that Instagram provides a public, viewable profile for your main content. On no other social network can you get this type of supplemental information about the posts themselves.

This makes NASA’s use of Stories quite the native strategy. Here’s a great example: Recently, NASA posted about the annual Perseid meteor shower on their Instagram account and used Stories to share more about the meteor shower and the research on it, talking to the scientists involved in the research and showing the equipment used for the research.

How you could do this for your business: 

After you choose a final photo to share on Instagram, snap a couple of extra ones that go behind-the-scenes. This can be as easy as:

• Flip your camera around to take a photo of the opposite view (example)
• Share some of the failed drafts of photos (Instagram Stories are ephemeral, thank goodness!)
• Snap a photo with the team that helped you create your Instagram photo
• Zoom out and photograph the setup – works great for product shots to show all that goes into getting the photo just right!

2. LOFT (@loft)

Turn Stories into real-time events (and amplify engagement)

LOFT, a women’s clothing brand, invited two best buddies for a style challenge, which was shared as an Instagram Story. The challenge: Find something (in the LOFT store) the other didn’t think she could wear.

Not only did LOFT allow their followers to follow along the fun challenge, LOFT also gave them an opportunity to engage with a recent Instagram post and help spread their brand by asking them to tag their best friends in the post.

(Hat tip to Amanda Tessier for this one!)

How you could do this for your business: 

Take a look at your event calendar and see if there are any upcoming events and activities that your online community can follow along. It could be:

1. Challenges like LOFT’s
2. Company retreats
3. Meetups, conferences, or roadshows

Otherwise, consider if you could organize fun games around your product or service which your online community could participate in by leaving a comment on one of your recent Instagram posts or sharing a photo with a particular hashtag.

3. Huffington Post (@huffingtonpost)

Use photos with captions to tell your stories

With the help of the text and drawing functionality of Instagram Stories, Huffington Post has been creating interesting short photo summaries of recent news, allowing their followers to consume their content in a more visual and fun manner.

How you could do this for your business: 

Go through all your recent blog posts and challenge yourself to turn one of them into a photo story. Adding captions will tend to make it easier while drawing with the three different Stories markers will bring more personality to your story.

4. TechCrunch (@techcrunch)

Give your followers a quick and easy way to consume your content

Quite similar to Huffington Post, TechCrunch has been using Instagram Stories to share headlines and short text summary of recent tech news.

How you could do this for your business: 

If you publish lots of content regularly like a news or media agency, summarize your articles with a headline and a tagline or sentence. If the news is shareworthy, adding your brand logo, like how TechCrunch did, could help to spread the awareness of your brand.

5. Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)

Mix high-quality edited content with raw authentic content (and keep in mind the vertical screen size)

Gary Vaynerchuk has been using Instagram Stories for several purposes — promoting his DailyVee videos through high-quality visuals, sharing very authentic glimpses into his daily life, and connecting genuinely with his followers.

In a recent Story, he mentioned that his followers asked for more wallpapers on his Instagram Stories and so he made more for them.

How you could do this for your business: 

Gary Vaynerchuk does quite a few things well on Instagram Stories, and here are some of the things you could try:

• If you produce video content as part of your marketing strategy, consider creating an extra version for the vertical mobile screen or simply add borders at the top and bottom, which Gary Vaynerchuk does sometimes.
• If you tend to use your Instagram posts to drive traffic to your content on your blog or Medium publication or YouTube channel, create promotional images and mention that the link is in your bio.
• If you create images for your social media posts, make an additional image for the vertical screen or reuse the one you created for Pinterest.
• Use Instagram Stories to do research and interact with your community. What types of content do they want from you via Instagram? How can you provide those content to them?

6. Chris Burkard (@chrisburkard)

Show your behind-the-scenes adventures

Chris Burkard is a very talented photographer with almost 2 million followers on Instagram.

He has been using Instagram Stories to take his followers through his adventures where he captures the jaw-dropping photos he shares on his Instagram accounts, including river crossings and camping outdoors with very windy conditions.

How you could do this for your business: 

While not every business might have such adventurous experiences on a regular basis, your followers might be interested in what your company does on a day-to-day basis. Think about some of the fun aspects you could show them, such as brainstorming sessions, team lunch, company games and more.

7. New York University (@nyuniversity)

Bring your followers on tours

New York University has a very engaged following on Instagram. Each of its posts has thousands of likes and 10–20 comments. Following the theme for its posts, New York University “takes” its followers on tours around the campus and city, enhancing the experience of following the account.

How you could do this for your business: 

This is great if you are a tourist attraction or school or even a retail store with a great physical space and environment!

When you are taking your afternoon break and going out for a walk, snap a few photos of interesting sights or locations and share them with your followers. These raw authentic snaps will give your followers a better sense of the area and might make them want to visit you more.

8. GoPro (@gopro)

Bring your followers on an adventure

GoPro is one of the brands I think of when I think of adventures. When Instagram Stories was launched, GoPro jumped onto the opportunity to share more footage taken with, yep, GoPro.

Recently, while making its GoPro family member’s dream come true of seeing the aurora australis, GoPro shared the adventure with its Instagram followers through incredible video footages of the trip.

How you could do this for your business: 

If you are an outdoor activities company, share all the thrilling and breathtaking videos of the outdoors with your followers.

For those who might not have such opportunities on a daily basis, here’s something else you could try. While GoPro’s Instagram Stories alone looks amazing enough, it is part of their #DreamReal marketing campaign of fulfilling their social media advocates’ dreams. You could perhaps:

1. Use Instagram Stories to promote your company’s hashtag and encourage more people to use it.
2. Show how happy the winners of your giveaways are or how awesome your giveaway prizes are to attract more people to participate in them in the future.

9. When I Work (@wheniwork)

Feature your customers and share behind the scenes

When I Work is employee scheduling software with over 15,000 happy customers worldwide. Recently, they visited a few of their customers in Canada and featured them in their Instagram Stories.

How you could do this for your business: 

If it is possible, visit your amazing customers and give them a shoutout on your Instagram Stories. This will let your followers know what types of businesses and individuals use your product and might give them the social proof they need in order to convert. Furthermore, this will help you build a stronger relationship with your customers.

10. Shopify (@shopify)

Promote your blog posts creatively

You might not always be able to visit our customers like When I Work so Shopify worked around that by letting merchants, who use Shopify for their business, take over the Shopify Instagram account and share about their business.

Apart from merchant takeovers, Shopify also promotes their blog posts through Instagram Stories.

How you could do this for your business: 

This is just one of the many ways you could promote your blog posts through Instagram Stories:

1. With the blog post you want to promote, find 3-5 key points that will grab your followers’ attention. (An easy way could be to look at your H2 headings.)
2. Turn them into fun Instagram Stories using relevant photos, captions, and drawings.
3. Create a simple bit.ly link to be used for the last photo.
4. Post them!
5. Bonus: It will be great to download each Instagram Stories photo onto your phone as you create them and post them all at once when you are ready. This will help to ensure that your followers see the full set of photos at a go.

11. Remote Year (@remoteyear)

Bring your offline and online communities together

Remote Year is a year-long program where 75 digital nomads travel across the world to work and explore 12 cities together.

Through their Instagram Stories, they share what they do on, I believe, a daily basis, allowing their followers who might not be able to join the trip to still be part of the fun.

How you could do this for your business: 

It can be a bit of a bummer for your community when they are unable to attend some of your events. It could be meetups or conferences with a limited number of tickets or an exclusive event for certain customers only or a program for a selected few such as the Remote Year. However, that does not mean they have to miss out on all the fun. Here are some of the things you could do:

• Interview key personnel briefly about the topic of the event
• Invite attendees to share their experiences at the event
• Film interesting and fun moments of the event
• Appoint a host or two for your Instagram Stories while the event is taking place to talk about what is going to happen during the event, narrate as the activities are happening and interview attendees, like what the Remote Year did for some of their events (as seen in the first photo)

12. Black Sheep Cycling (@blacksheepcycling)

Give sneak previews of your upcoming products or launch them through Instagram Stories

Black Sheep Cycling is a cycling brand that provides innovative and unique cycling apparel.

A few days ago, they launched their ambassador kit for their community. Besides announcing the upcoming launch with an Instagram post, the team also used Instagram Stories to showcase the kit from various angles.

How you could do this for your business: 

While preparing the marketing materials for your upcoming launch or announcement, create a few more vertical designs for your Instagram Stories. Consider more than one image or design since the ephemeral nature of Instagram Stories allow you to share more photos and videos without cluttering up your Instagram profile. Here are some variations you could think about:

• Different angles of the product
• Specific features of the product
• Different people using your product
• Various ways of using your product

13. Olympics (@olympics)

Report timely news and wrap-up

When the Rio 2016 Olympics was taking place, the social media team behind the Instagram account took the opportunity to share more about and celebrate the incredible Olympians. Harrison Barnes also took over the account to give a wrap-up for a day and shared his thoughts on the day’s events.

How you could do this for your business: 

While you might not always be part of huge events like the Olympics, there are likely to be many high-profile events in your respective industry. For example in the tech field, one such event is TechCrunch Disrupt. You could attend such events and provide timely updates to your followers. Here are some possible ways:

• Create simple images to share cool announcements and important news from the event
• Share your thoughts about the announcements and news of the event
• Interview speakers and prominent figures in the industry briefly, if possible
• Feature partners and customers who happen to be at the same event

14. Brian Fanzo (@isocialfanz)

Give previews of your talks and let others take over your Instagram Stories

Brian Fanzo, popularly known as isocialfanz, is a millennial speaker who is very knowledgeable about community building, social media, livestreaming, influencer marketing, tech and more. In 2016 alone, Brian will keynote at more than 40 events around the world.

He has been using Instagram Stories to give previews for his upcoming talks and events such as the #Cloudtalk. He did the same when he was taking over our Buffer Instagram Stories while Brian, our Social Media Manager, took over his.

How you could do this for your business: 

Work with other brands and influencers to take over your Instagram account and ask to take over theirs too. Like Gary Vaynerchuk said, “It’s an easy way to reach new audiences and increase brand awareness.” And it’s great because both parties stand to benefit from the takeovers.

A cool feature of Instagram Stories is that it allows you upload any photos and videos that were added to your phone’s camera roll within the last 24 hours. Simply swipe down while you are in the Instagram Stories camera mode. This allows you to share photos and videos from the brands and influencers without having to share your Instagram account password.

1. Get them to create Instagram Stories and save them onto their phones without posting them.
2. Get them to send their draft Stories to you via email, Dropbox or Google Drive.
3. Download them onto your phone before the time you wish to post them (you will have 24 hours to use them after downloading them onto your phone).
4. Wait for the right time and voila!

15. Minaal (@minaalofficial)

Share user generated content and showcase your customers

Minaal makes durable, professional travel gear that gets you where you want to be – faster, happier and more productive. (It is a brand many Bufferoos love too!)

In their Stories, they share photos from their community who are traveling all around the world with the amazing travel bags and gear.

How you could do this for your business: 

Many a time, we love to showcase our users’ photos of them using our products, only to realize that the photo quality might not be on par with those we post on our profile or it might not match the theme of photos we chose for our gallery. Instagram Stories provides a great option to feature your users (and your product) without changing the theme of your Instagram branding or adding too many photos to your gallery.

Invite your users to share photos of themselves using your product and let them know that you will be featuring them on your Instagram Stories. Alternatively,

1. Look out for photos of your product by your users (if there’s a hashtag that your community uses, that will be very handy)
2. Reach out to those users and ask if you could feature their photos and them on your Instagram Stories.
3. Once you have the photos, add their Instagram handle and perhaps add some drawings to the photos to make them more interesting.

16. 9gag (@9gag)

Funny user generated content and stories

I think most of us are quite familiar with 9gag and their hilarious content. With Instagram Stories, they brought their funny storytelling to another level!

How you could do this for your business: 

I believe most businesses aren’t like 9gag in terms of the amount of user generated content they have (thought it’s great if you do!). However, this does not mean we cannot learn anything from 9gag. I think 9gag is a great example of telling the same stories through different formats (on their website, Instagram posts, Instagram Stories and more).

Instagram Stories allow us to quickly click through a series of photos and videos, and that’s a great way to tell stories! It feels a bit like flipping through a photo book. So an idea could be:

1. When you have a story or message to share with your audience, come up with a storyboard of the photos and videos you need.
2. Download the materials onto your phone and add captions and drawings to make them more engaging and visually appealing.
3. When the time is right, publish all of them together according to your storyboard.
4. Bonus: You could use an Instagram post to briefly talk about the story and direct your audience to check out your Instagram Stories for more information.

17. Sean McCabe (@seanwes)

Give previews of your live events or courses

Sean McCabe used to be a hand lettering artist who charged five-figure rates until he launched a course teaching people how to do what he did and made six figures in the first three days. Since then, he has been teaching a variety of courses on building and growing a sustainable business.

He has been using Instagram Stories to share sneak peeks of his live training and why his followers should sign up for his courses.

How you could do this for your business: 

Personally, I like to find out as much as I can before I pay for a course, a product, or a service. Quite similar to a trial for a product or service, Instagram Stories could be an interesting way to share just enough to entice your followers into signing up for your paid courses or exclusive content.

Also, sharing a short memorable link makes it easier for your followers to act immediately.

18. TrackMaven (@trackmaven)

Share top news in your industry

TrackMaven is a marketing analytics software tool that helps marketers make smart decisions through understandable and actionable data. In line with their area of expertise, they share top marketing news every week in their Instagram Stories.

How you could do this for your business: 

I imagine most of us are already reading up a lot about our own industry so this just takes a tiny bit more effort:

1. When reading through all the news, bookmark the top 3 to 5 pieces which are most shareworthy or most useful to the people in the industry or your customers.
2. On Friday each week (or even every morning), share the news.
3. Adding your thoughts about the news could help to make you a thought leader in your industry too.

Small plug

I would also love to give a shout out to Brian, our amazing social media manager, who has been rocking our Instagram Stories game too. Our Stories range from social media tips to influencer, brand and team member takeovers. If you are interested in learning more about social media, marketing and behind the scenes of a remote team, we are @buffer on Instagram!

Over to you

There are definitely many more creative brands and folks out there that I did not come across during my research. I’d love to hear from you in the comments below if you know of any or if you feel that you are creating awesome Instagram Stories, feel free to share your handle below! Thank you!

You might also enjoy these Instagram marketing resources:

A Complete Guide to Instagram Marketing: Get the Playbook That Drives Results

How Instagram Stories Work: A Powerful New Way to Engage

How to Create Beautiful Instagram Stories (and 10 Amazing Templates to Use)

 

Thank Instagram Stories: How 18 Brands And Influencers Are Using It (And You Can Too!) for first publishing this post.

How to Schedule Instagram Stories

Since the feature was introduced in August 2016, Stories have completely changed how people, and brands use Instagram. 

More than 500 million Instagrammers use Stories every day, and the format has opened up a wealth of content opportunities for marketers: Whether you want to boost engagement, take your followers behind-the-scenes or promote your latest product releases and sales, you can do it all with Instagram Stories. 

Now you can also plan and schedule Instagram Stories directly within Buffer, on web or on mobile. Try it now for free. 

Introducing Buffer for Instagram Stories 

Buffer helps you prepare and share your Stories with confidence.

With Buffer you can easily re-arrange and preview your Stories, so that you’ll know they’ll be posted in the right order. You can pre-write your captions, to avoid any spelling slip-ups that can happen when you post on the fly. And you’ll have images and videos sent to your phone when it’s time to post, so you don’t have to waste time digging around your camera roll. 

Try Stories scheduling free for 14 days on Buffer Publish Premium and Business plans.

How to schedule Instagram Stories with Buffer 

With Buffer you can plan, preview, and schedule your Instagram Stories ahead of time, so that you have everything ready to post with a single push notification. 

You can storyboard your posts, create draft captions, and choose the time you want to post your stories. Then, when it’s time to post, Buffer will send you a reminder with everything you need to share your Story.

Here’s how it works: 

1. Open the Stories tab

Stories have their own queue in your Buffer Publish dashboard. If you have an Instagram account connected, you can find it under the Stories tab.

2. Add to Story

To create a Story, select Add to Story to open the Stories composer.

3. Add Media Files

Once the Stories composer is open, the next thing to do is upload your content. Select Add Media Files to upload your Story images and videos. You can upload up to 10 media files to make up a Story. 

4. Arrange your Story

Drag and drop media files in the order you want, so that you can visualize and arrange your Story. You’ll be able to adjust the cropping and positioning of each individual image or video when you finish the post in Instagram.

5. Add a note to each media file

Hovering over an uploaded media file will prompt you to add a note. You can use notes to prepare a caption, or remind yourself to add stickers, polls, music or hashtags to the post. When we send you a mobile notification to complete the post, your note will be copied to your clipboard for easy pasting.

6. Preview your Story

You can use the Preview button to see how your Story will appear. 

Note: you’ll be able to readjust and reposition each image or video when you finish the post in Instagram.

7. Schedule your Story

Use the Schedule Story button to open up the time and date picker. Choose the day and time that you want to post the Story, and we’ll send a push notification to mobile device with everything you need to complete the post in Instagram.

You can also schedule Stories using the Buffer mobile app, which is a great option if you already have content saved on your mobile device.

Try Buffer for Instagram Stories for free now with a 14-day trial.

How scheduling Instagram Stories can help your business

Instagram Stories have become a powerful tool for marketers to drive traffic, increase engagement and even make sales. 

But stories only last 24hrs, and the grind of creating and posting new content daily can be very challenging. Whether you’re struggling with creating the content, keeping all your assets in one place or simply remembering to post it between the other tasks in your calendar every day, scheduling can help.

Here are just a few of the benefits of scheduling your Instagram Stories posts: 

1. Plan Stories on web or mobile

Whether you’re on the go or sitting at your desktop, Buffer enables you to plan and schedule stories posts from the web and mobile (using the Buffer apps). This makes it easier for you to post stories when the time comes, freeing up more time to think about your content and achieving your Instagram goals, instead of preparing and scheduling of Stories. 

2. Bulk upload images and video

When we interviewed some of our customers on how they create stories, one of the biggest pain points we found was organizing and storing all of the photos and videos they wanted to include within their stories. 

With Buffer for Instagram Stories, you can bulk upload up to 10 assets for each of your scheduled stories posts. No more searching around various files or drives for assets, or sending everything to your camera roll before publishing. 

3. Drag and drop storyboarding

Want to see how your story will flow when it’s live? Buffer enables you to visualize and arrange your Story ahead of publishing. Once all of your media files are uploaded you can also drag and drop your media files to ensure your story goes out in the order you want. 

4. Prepare links and captions

Alongside uploading media to Buffer, you can also add notes to include any links and captions you want to post with each part of your story. Pre-writing your captions can help to avoid any spelling mistakes and make sure your story flows just as you’d planned it to. 

Once you’ve added your notes, you can also preview your story to make sure everything is looking great before it’s time to publish. 

Get started with a 14-day free trial 

Buffer for Instagram Stories is available on Publish Premium and Business plans. Whether you’re new to Buffer or an existing customer, you can take this feature for a test-drive right now with a 14-day free trial. 

Thank How to Schedule Instagram Stories for first publishing this post.

The Science Behind the Best Instagram Bios

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Small-but-powerful. Front-and-center. Instagram bios are well worth the time and investment to write well and test often. They’re one of the most visible descriptions of who you are and what you’re about! We’ll sort out all the best practices, design tips, and strategies that the top brands and profiles are using today.

Should you go highly descriptive of what you do, or keep it loose and aspirational? 

Should you include contact info? hashtags? emoji? 

And how often should you update it? 

We’ll unpack these questions together and send you on your way with some tips that you can try on your bio today!

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The Golden Rule of Instagram Bios: There is no one, right way

First off, let’s start with a golden rule about social media marketing, which applies here to Instagram bios, too. 

There’s no one single “correct” way to create an Instagram bio.

We’ll give you lots of tips about best practices and tactics to try, but ultimately you’ll find that there is no consensus on the single best way to write a bio. Your mileage may vary with some of these tips, and you’re bound to find an ideal format — or two — for your brand’s bio. 

The one thing we love to remind people of is to constantly be testing and iterating. We’ll get into some tips for testing later in the episode. 

Where the bio lives on your Instagram profile page

Let’s define what we even mean when we talk about Instagram bio. 

The bio is one of many pieces of information at the top of your profile. This list includes: 

• Your Instagram username
• Your actual name, either yours or your business’s
• Your bio – a sentence or phrase or paragraph describing who you are
• and one link

For Instagram business accounts, you get a few extra pieces of information. You can choose a category for your business and add contact information like a phone number or physical address. 

We’ll be spending the majority of our time on the bio itself — the sentences or phrases that you can use to describe your profile. But we’ll sprinkle in some tips about usernames and links, too. 

Ok, let’s dive right into some of the top tips that we’ve pulled from looking at hundreds of beautiful bios on Instagram. 

Tip #1: Make the most of your limited space, and drive people to take an action from your Instagram bio

You get 150 characters to use in your Instagram bio. It’s important that you make the most of it!

One common way that we see brands do this is by focusing the bio on a single action that they want the visitor to take. It’s reminiscent of some of our favorite email marketing advice: that a good email should have one job to do — for instance, getting clicks to a pricing page or driving traffic to a blog. 

You can think of your bio in the same way. The quickest and clearest way to drive action from your bio is — quite simply — use a verb. It can be “share this” or “shop that” or anything action-oriented.

N: We’ve seen this work especially well around big campaigns. Often, if a brand is running a campaign, their bio will reflect it — the text will be updated, the link will be related, and all of it will point visitors to a single destination. 

A few other examples of “single jobs” that a bio can do include: 

• sending visitors to a community hub
• letting visitors know how to get in touch with you with support questions
• promoting a branded hashtag or a fellow Insta account — more on this in a bit
• reinforcing your brand’s positioning
• sharing a bit of social proof via a review or press mention

Having so many options here adds to the fact that you can — and maybe should — update your Instagram bio with regularity. From what we’ve seen on the Instagram bios of the brands we researched, it can be a good practice to refresh your bio every month, either as part of a monthly social media audit or whenever a fresh marketing campaign comes up.

Seeing this list also makes me think about our first rule of Instagram bios: there is no one “correct” way to do a bio. We saw some brands that included almost every job in a single bio!

All this talk about calls-to-action dovetails nicely with our next tip: 

Tip #2: Make your one bio link count — either match the link to your bio or try a multi-URL landing page.

At Buffer, we’re big fans of the latter — using the link to send folks to a landing page with multiple URLs. We built this into the Buffer product with our new Shop Grid feature, which comes with Buffer business plans. 

The way it works: You get a single URL to put on your Instagram profile, and that URL links out to a landing page that shows off a number of different links based on your previous Instagram posts. You can assign a link to every post, essentially making your whole Instagram feed clickable. 

Shop Grid has been especially useful for ecommerce brands and profiles that show a lot of products in their feed. I’ve seen it work really well for marketers and personal brands, too.

Additionally, there are tools like Link Tree that let you add any links to a single landing page — perhaps a link to your homepage, your YouTube, and your contact forms, for instance. 

No matter what tool you use, the multi-URL landing page can be a great asset for your bio. If you’re encouraging visitors to take action from your bio, you can send them straight to the bio link. And same goes for any messaging you have in the captions of your Instagram photos. 

Tip #3: Add Line Breaks to Your Bio

Line breaks are the hard returns that let you place text on the next line below. You’ve probably seen them used in Instagram captions and many other spots. You’ve probably even seen them in some cool Instagram bios. These list-style bios are some of the most popular ones out there.

They can be a really effective way to communicate information and space out the different attributes of your bio .. if, say, you have your company tagline, followed by a branded hashtag, followed by a call to action. 

But of course, if you’ve tried to do this for your bio, you might have found that line breaks can be a bit tricky to implement. 

Here’s what we’ve found to get this to work: 

• Get out your laptop or log onto your desktop and visit instagram.com. Then go to your profile page and click Edit Profile
• This opens up your Instagram profile settings, and you can type directly into the bio from here. Simply use the Enter key to put in a new line break. 
• Voila! When you click “submit” it should save your bio just as you intended, with all line breaks included

Tip #4: Put emoji in your bio

If you’re keen on having a bio that stands out, there are few things more eye-catching than a well-placed emoji next to a block of text. 

Of course, you’ll want to make sure that any emoji you use are on brand and in context to what you’re saying in your bio. We don’t recommend using emoji for emoji’s sake — although that probably would catch someone’s eye. 

A few examples that we really love include: 

• Using an emoji that captures the essence of your product — say the coffee emoji if you’re a coffee seller or the palm tree emoji if you work in the vacation space
• A globe emoji for travel brands or remote work teams
• And one of the most eye-catching ones I’ve seen: the red SOS emoji when talking about ways to get in touch with your customer support team

In addition to emoji, you can also use special characters like hearts or boxes or wingdings — any of those fun black-and-white shapes that you might’ve seen before online or in text editors. 

Example from textfac.es

To add emoji, you can do it right from the Instagram app in your profile’s settings, and to add special characters, you can do this in the same way you added line breaks – by logging in to the web version of Instagram and editing your bio from there. 

Another way to design a noticeable bio is something we’ve hinted at multiple times already this episode:

Tip #5: Use hashtags and @mentions right in your bio

Linking to other profiles and hashtags is not only eye-catching, it’s also useful. Any hashtags or profiles you put in your bio are tappable — they’ll take you to that person’s profile or the Instagram listing for the hashtag. 

Many brands use the @mentions to link out to sub-brands — for instance fashion brands might link to labels within the brand. 

And for hashtags, we commonly see this used with branded hashtags. We have one of our own — #bufferlove — that we use to track positive word of mouth and kind words about Buffer. The travel brand Away used the hashtag #travelaway as its branded keyword, right in the bio.

One of the neat things about adding hashtags to your Instagram bio is that it can help with discoverability for your content. It’s like having a bonus Instagram feed. 

And on the topic of discoverability, that reminds me of some of the hidden power of your name on Instagram. 

When people are searching on Instagram, the only parts of your Instagram profile that will be included in search results are your name and username. That’s it. So if you stuff your bio with the word “apparel” 10 times, Instagram search won’t know about it. 

But, if you add that keyword to your display name on Instagram, or if you’re lucky enough to have grabbed a username with the keyword in it, then Instagram will recognize it in search results. For instance, with Buffer, we could have our display name as Buffer – Social Media Marketing.

Recap

• First, you have only 150 characters in your bio, so keep this in mind as you’re crafting your message.
• Second, think of the “one job” that your Instagram bio has. Do you want people to shop? To come to your website? To share with a hashtag? Don’t be afraid to ask for it.
• Third, make the most of your one Instagram link. Tools like Buffer’s Shop Grid give you extra options to make this link go further.
• Fourth, format your bio in an eye-catching way. Consider a list-style bio with line breaks, or add relevant emoji to the different aspects of your description.
• And fifth, consider your bio as one piece of the overall presentation of your profile. Optimize your username for search, add contact info and categories for your business, and give thought to the link you’re using.

Remember: there is no single “correct” way to craft an Instagram bio.

We hope that these tips have been helpful for giving you ideas on what to try next. 

If anything, the key takeaway for me with all this is that it makes sense to keep trying new things! Change up your bio once a month or whenever a new campaign or new focus comes up. 

We can’t wait to see what you come up with.

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How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Heather-Mae on Twitter
• Dave on Twitter

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

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About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

Thank The Science Behind the Best Instagram Bios for first publishing this post.