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

More than 15 million businesses now use Instagram worldwide and over half of those businesses are creating Stories every month.

Stories are an incredible way to connect with your audience in fresh and authentic ways. Who knows, maybe they’ll even become the new News Feed.

But creating attractive Instagram Stories can be challenging and time-consuming.

We’d love to help with that!

We’ve teamed up with the team at Adobe Spark, an awesome free design tool, to share 10 Instagram Stories templates you can use to quickly create your Instagram stories.

We’ll share how we create outstanding Instagram Stories graphics in under 10 minutes each.

Instagram Stories: 10 ways your business can use Stories (plus 10 free Adobe Spark templates)

There are so many different ways to use Instagram Stories.

At Buffer, we use Stories to:

• Discuss our latest blog posts
• Take our community behind the scenes
• Share social media stats and data
• And much more

To help you get the most out of Instagram Stories, we’ve created 10 easy-to-edit Instagram Stories templates that you can use to right away.

How to use these Instagram Stories templates:

1. Click on the ‘Use this template’ button under your chosen template
2. You’ll then be taken to Adobe Spark to edit the template (you’ll need to create a free account to do this)
3. Once logged in, edit the template as you wish: change the background, caption style, etc.
4. Download the finished graphic and you’re ready to post to your Story

Let’s jump in!

1. Storytelling

Use this template

One common use case for Instagram Stories is to show behind-the-scenes content. For example:

• Restaurants show how their dishes are prepared
• Musicians show how their music is recorded in their studio
• Sports teams share training sessions with fans
• Fashion experts demonstrate how to put together the perfect outfit
• SaaS platforms could provide an inside look at their company hack-day

This template could be used to introduce a story to your audience — like an opening title. If you want a bit of inspiration, here are 11 storytelling formulas you can refer to.

2. How-to tutorials

Use this template

This is our favorite way of using Instagram Stories — to educate. We’ve used Instagram Stories to share how to curate content, set benchmarks, and much more.

If you want to share some tips or teach your followers how to do something (such as how to use your product), you could try using this template.

For example, we often get questions about the perfect size for Instagram Stories (1080px X 1920px) or how to advertise on Facebook. We’ll take these questions and turn them into short Stories tutorials.

3. Blog post promotion

Use this template

Blog post promotion is another thing we often do with Instagram stories.

Instead of simply asking people to visit our blog, we like to highlight the key points via Stories. Repurposing content across channels is a great way to ensure it reaches as much of your audience as possible.

If you write how-to guides or create how-to videos, you can adapt the how-to tutorial template above to promote your content.

4. Lists and countdowns

Use this template

I learned this strategy from Airbnb. I’ve seen them share lists of the best places to live, workspaces in Airbnb homes, and more.

You might be interested in sharing:

• Various ways to use your product
• Surprising stats and facts about your industry
• User-generated content

You can also try fun and entertaining lists such as “top books for marketers” or “top things we learned in social media this month.” People love a good list!

5. Limited time offers and promotions

Use this template

As Instagram Story lasts for only 24 hours, making it a great way to promote time limited sales. This is a strategy often used by online clothing retailers.

For example, Black Sheep Cycling launched their new limited edition cycling kit through Instagram Stories and sold them out in 30 minutes.

You could use this template to share your offers with your followers.

6. Giveaways and discount coupons

Use this template

To entice followers to watch their Instagram stories, brands sometimes host exclusive giveaways or give out discount coupons in their Instagram stories.

Again, this is great for online retailers who drive sales through social media promotions. You could use a unique discount code specifically for your Instagram stories to track how much sales your Instagram stories generate.

At Buffer, we’ve used this technique to help encourage reviews to our podcast.

• First, we thanked all of our weekly listeners for being a part of the show and then we showed a picture of Buffer socks and shirts.
• Next, we asked people to respond to our Stories with a  if they have listened to our podcast or a  if they’ve reviewed our podcast.
• Everyone was entered for a chance to win swag!

7. Data, research, and statistics

Use this template

Do you know any interesting (or surprising) statistics about your industry that your followers might be interested in?

Mentioning a cool stat can be a great way to get the attention of your followers before you share something important (such as an announcement or a blog post).

8. Quotes and inspiration

Use this template

Several social media influencers such as Gary Vaynerchuk often share motivational quotes on their Instagram Stories.

It doesn’t only have to be a motivational quote. You could share a quote from your most recent blog post or a quote from your CEO — if it’s relevant to your followers, it’s often work sharing.

9. Introduction for an Instagram takeover

Use this template

An Instagram Stories takeover has a nice advantage over a traditional Instagram post takeover, in that your guest can post as many stories as they like without filling up your nicely-curated gallery.

Before you let your guest post on your account, you might want to promote the takeover or introduce the guest, and that’s where this template will come in handy.

You could also use this template if you want to host a question and answer session with your followers through Instagram Stories. Let your followers know what the session is about and invite them to DM you questions.

10. Announcements, news, and updates

Use this template

We have shared several fun announcements using Instagram stories: the launch of our podcast, the launch of our online social media strategy class, our celebrations for Social Media Day, and more.

You could use this template to build up the anticipation for your announcements and then to reveal the surprise through a subsequent story.

How to design your own Instagram stories in under 10 mins

Adobe Spark is one of our favorite free design tools for creating graphics. With the app, I managed to create this graphic in just four simple steps:

Here’s how I did it.

(Feel free to grab a free Adobe Spark account to follow along!)

1. Select the Instagram story template

Adobe Spark has a handy template for Instagram Stories, so you know your post will be perfecly sized.

(If you are wondering, the ideal dimensions for Instagram Stories are 1080px wide by 1920px tall.)

To find the template, create a new post, select “More sizes”, and choose “Instagram Story”.

Enter the caption for your story and hit “Continue”.

Adobe Spark will generate a design with your caption. (Sometimes, it looks great enough to be used without further edits!)

2. Set your background

Next, pick a background for your Instagram story. (Or you can stick with Adobe Spark’s suggestion if you like it.)

With Adobe Spark, you can set the background as a plain color or an image.

• To use a plain color for the background, select your preferred color from the side panel and Adobe Spark will remove the suggested image.
• To use an image, click on the image and then click “Replace” above it. Adobe Spark has a search function for you to find free images (that are tagged as Creative Commons-licensed) to use.

We often use a simple colored background because text can be hard to read on some images. That said, when designed properly, Instagram Stories with an image as the background can look very appealing.

Here’re a few quick tips for using an image as the graphic’s background:

• Choose a relevant image that has few things in it and preferably with a clear background such as the sky or sea
• Place your text on the part of the image with a clear background
• Use a photo filter and use a bright color, such as white, for your text

For this example, we’ll use an image for the background. Here’s how I set an image as the background:

3. Edit your caption

Next, spice up your caption.

With Adobe Spark, there are six different ways you can edit your caption.

• Shape
• Color
• Font
• Spacing
• Alignment
• Opacity

If you are not sure how to design your caption, no worries at all. Adobe Spark has a neat feature that suggests different designs for you. All you have to do is turn the dial.

(To go back to previous suggestions, simply turn the dial in the opposite direction.)

Once you have found a design you like, you can still make adjustments to it such as changing the color or the font.

If you want to add more text to your graphic, click on the green plus icon above the graphic and then, “add text”.

4. Download

Finally, to download the graphic, click “Share” at the top of the page and then, “Download” on the left.

Transfer it to your mobile phone and you’ll be ready to post your newly-designed Instagram Stories graphic. You can find this graphic by swiping up or tapping the image icon when you’re in your Instagram Stories camera mode.

If you are using an iPhone, you can also use Adobe Spark’s iOS app to download your graphic to your mobile phone directly. (The Android version is coming soon.)

Optional: Draw, add stickers, and more

If you like, you could also add more details to your graphic using the Instagram app before posting it. Draw, add stickers, add hashtags, and more to make it look more fun.

Also, adding hashtags and location tag helps people who aren’t following you discover your Instagram stories.

Additional tools and resources

There are many other great design tools and resources available if you wish to create Instagram Stories videos or customize your Instagram Stories graphics further.

Here are a few options:

1. Video tools: Stories Ad

Stories Ad is a free tool for creating “stunning Stories in less than 2 minutes”. It provides 12 professionally-produced video templates you can use to create Instagram Stories videos.

Follow the instructions on the web editor, and it will send your video to your email inbox.

Other video tools: Flyr, Animaker, and After Effects

2. Mobile apps: Storeo

(Image from Molly Marshall Marketing)

If you like use long videos for your Instagram stories, you might love Storeo. Storeo is a mobile app that slices your videos into clips of 15 seconds — the maximum length of an Instagram Stories video. It will save you lots of time from manually editing your videos into 15-second clips yourself.

For $9, you can remove the watermark on the clips.

Other mobile apps: Flyr, Over, and Flipagram (Hat-tip to Molly Marshall for these app recommendations.)

3. Marketplaces: Creative Market

You can also get Instagram Stories templates designed by talented creators for about $10 to $20 on Creative Market. Many of these templates are Photoshop files so you’ll need a basic knowledge of Photoshop to customize the template for your purpose.

Other marketplaces: 99designs and TopTal

What’s your favorite Instagram Stories tip?

Using templates can be a great, easy way to create amazing Instagram stories in minutes. I’m grateful to the team at Adobe Spark for creating these wonderful Instagram Stories templates we have shared with you in this post.

I’m sure using templates is just one of the many ways to save time while creating Instagram stories. Do you know of any other tips for creating Instagram stories quickly? 

If you are going to use any of these templates, we would love for you to share any one of your graphics in the comments below! 

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Image credit: Unsplash

Thank How to Create Beautiful Instagram Stories (and 10 Amazing Templates to Use) for first publishing this post.

The 25 Top Social Media Management Tools for Businesses of All Sizes

How do you stay on top of all your social media marketing tasks?

From creating and publishing content to analytics and reporting, it can be pretty overwhelming to think of all the jobs social media marketers have to complete every day.

Thankfully, there are a bunch of awesome social media management tools available to help. These tools can streamline your workflows, help you save some time and even ensure your content reaches the right audience at the right time.

But how do you decide which product to use?

With so many great social media management tools out there, we thought it could be great to showcase some of the top ones to help you pick what’s best for your business.

Here are 25 of the very best social media management tools out there.

The 25 top social media management tools and platforms

The list is broken down into two sections:

1. Tools more suitable for small-to-medium businesses and
2. Tools more suitable for enterprise businesses (Click here to skip to this list.)

The distinction is largely made based on the price and isn’t clear-cut. If you are a small-to-medium business, a tool on the second list might suit you, and vice-versa.

The 15 top social media management tools for SMBs

The tools are not arranged in any particular order and they’re all great in their own unique ways. If there’s a reason you love a tool and I didn’t mention it, feel free to give it a shout in the comments section to help others understand more about that particular tool.

Compare the tools easily with this spreadsheet

To make it easier for you to compare the tools, I’ve created a spreadsheet with the following information of each social media management tool:

• The prices
• Free plan or free trial?
• Product offering
• Social networks supported
• Unique value

Let’s look through each tool!

1. Buffer

The platform for successful social media management

Prices: Free plan, $10, $99, $199, and $399 per month (with a 14-day free trial)

Description: Buffer is an intuitive, streamlined social media management platform trusted by brands, businesses, agencies, and individuals to help drive meaningful engagement and results on social media.

We have a suite of products for publishing, engagement, analytics, and team collaboration. Our products are carefully considered and highly refined in order to help social media marketers and teams work more efficiently and effectively.

Unique value: What we’ve heard from our customers is that they love how clean and intuitive our tools are, how friendly and timely our customer support is, and how helpful our content is.

Once you’ve researched all your options and if you think Buffer might suit your needs, we would love for you to give it a try and see the difference it can make for your social media management.

2. Hootsuite

Manage your social media in one place

Prices: Free plan, $19, $99, $499 per month, and enterprise pricing (with a 14-day free trial)

Description: Hootsuite, probably the biggest social media management tool, is used by over 15 million people and more than 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies.

There’s a good reason for their success: it’s an all-in-one platform that allows you to curate and schedule content, measure your social ROI, run social media ads, and more.

Unique value: Being such a comprehensive platform, there are several things that people love about Hootsuite: being able to monitor multiple accounts and keywords, connect with over 35 social networks, and bulk-schedule social media posts.

3. Sprout Social

Powerful social media software

Prices: $99, $149, and $249 per user per month (with a 30-day free trial)

Description: Similar to Hootsuite, Sprout Social combines several social media tools into one platform — from social media scheduling to monitoring, to reporting.

Sprout Social is one of the few social media management tools that provides customer relationship management (CRM) features. Having a complete profile of your customers help you serve them better and build stronger relationships with them.

Unique value: The most common praise I’ve heard about Sprout Social is its amazing reports. Many social media managers found the reports so great and beautiful that they would download and send them to their managers or clients without editing them.

4. Agora Pulse

Simple & affordable social media management

Prices: $49, $99, $199, and $299 per month (with a 15-day free trial)

Description: Like the social media management platforms mentioned above, Agora Pulse is also an all-in-one social media platform with scheduling, responding, and reporting features.

Unique value: Unlike the rest, Agora Pulse has several unique features such as competitor analysis and Facebook contest apps at a very affordable price point.

5. Sendible

The #1 social media management tool for agencies

Prices: $49, $199, $499 per month, and enterprise pricing (with a 30-day free trial)

Description: Sendible is a social media management tool built specifically for agencies with several clients. On top of most features that social media management tools provide, Sendible allows you to customize your dashboard according to your branding to attract new clients.

Unique value: Sendible has some impressive integrations such as the Canva graphics editor, royalty-free image search, and YouTube search. It also provides some automation for those who want to save time on repetitive tasks.

6. Everypost

Social media publishing simplified

Prices: $9.99, $29.99, $49.99, $99.99 per month, and enterprise pricing (with a 14-day free trial)

Description: Everypost makes it easy to curate content, customize, and schedule your social media posts. It has a strong focus on visual content, allowing you to pull images and videos from Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, and your RSS feeds.

While it doesn’t have social media analytics at the moment, it’s stated on the website that the feature is coming soon.

Unique value: Everypost is one of the few social media management tools that allow you to customize your social media post for each social media platform. Also, its visual content curation feature allows you to easily find and attach the multimedia content that you want.

7. Social Pilot

Social media marketing & scheduling tool for agencies & social media professionals

Prices: Free plan, $10, $20, $30 per month, and enterprise pricing (with a 14-day free trial)

Description: I like how Social Pilot fit many of the social media management tools (such as scheduling and analytics but not monitoring) into a simple dashboard and offer it at very affordable prices. With its client management feature, I believe it’s great for agencies that work with several clients.

Unique value: Social Pilot curates and suggests content from several industries (such as tech, education, and health and fitness), which is great if you want to find relevant content easily.

Another valuable feature is its social media content calendar, which allows you to see your scheduled posts in a glance and rearrange them by dragging and dropping.

8. CoSchedule

#1 marketing calendar for everything you need organized

Prices: $30, $60, $300, and up to $1,600 per month (with a 14-day free trial)

Description: CoSchedule is more than a social media management tool; it’s a powerful calendar to manage many aspects of your marketing. With CoSchedule, you can manage and collaborate with your team to create your social media posts, content, events, and tasks.

Unique value: CoSchedule is great for marketers who want to organize all their projects (social media, content, events, emails, etc.) in one place.

Their ReQueue feature helps you automatically find optimal posting times and fill gaps in your social media schedule with your best posts.

9. MavSocial

Affordable and easy-to-use social media management & advertising software

Prices: Free, $19, $59, $199 per month, and enterprise pricing (with 7-day free trial)

Description: MavSocial is a social media management tool with a focus on visual content. For the higher-priced plans, it seems that you can also manage your Facebook ads with MavSocial.

Unique value: On top of the common features (such as scheduling, monitoring, and reporting), MavSocial has a digital library where you can manage, use, and edit your multimedia for your social media posts and a search engine where you can browse through millions of stock photos.

If you wish, MavSocial can also help you repeat your social media posts for a specified duration.

10. Friends+Me

Share to anywhere

Prices: $3 per connected account per month (with a 15-day free trial)

Description: Friends+Me has a strong focus on Google+ but also allows you to schedule your content to several other social platforms.

Unique value: Friends+Me supports scheduling for Google+ profiles, collections, communities, and pages and allows you to set up automations to re-post your Google+ posts onto your other social media accounts, which is great for marketers who focus on Google+.

Also, you can have an unlimited number of posts in your queue!

11. Crowdfire

Your super-smart marketing sidekick

Price: Free

Description: Crowdfire is like a capable marketing assistant. Through a conversation-style setup, it tries to understand your social media goals and recommends things you can do to reach your goals (such as grow a following, drive traffic to your blog, or sell your products).

You can also schedule posts and set up automations for your social media accounts. The analytics feature will be coming soon.

Unique value: Crowdfire provides a personalized service depending on your goals. For example, if you connect your Shopify store and add a new product to your store, Crowdfire will create and suggest a social media post about the product for you to share.

12. Edgar

Like hiring a content manager for a fraction of the cost

Prices: $49/month (with a 14-day free trial)

Description: Edgar takes a creative new approach to social media sharing. The idea is that you just have to create a library of content with various categories and add time slots with a specific category (or a random category). Edgar will automatically fill up those time slots with the content in your library.

Unique value: What people like about Edgar is that it automates social media post creation and scheduling in a clever way. Instead of simply posting your social media posts several times, it recycles your library of content according to the categories.

13. Post Planner

Social media engagement app

Prices: Free plan, $3, $9, $19, $49, $99 per month, and enterprise pricing

Description: Post Planner wants to help social media marketers with three key jobs: find high-quality content, plan the perfect publishing calendar, and post consistently. It curates and rates content suggestions and allows you to create a content-type-based schedule (more below).

Unique value: With its Find tool, Post Planner makes it super easy to find content that has proven to engage people.

Also, instead of just picking your time slots in your schedule (to form your sharing plan), you can select the content type for each time slot and Post Planner will fill the slots with your chosen content accordingly. (You can also schedule posts outside of this plan.)

14. Tailwind

Smarter visual marketing

Prices: Free trial with limited features, $9.99, $799.99 per month, and enterprise pricing

Description: Tailwind is a social media management tool for Pinterest and Instagram. Apart from helping you schedule posts, monitor conversations, and measure results, Tailwind provides recommendations for improving your Pinterest and Instagram performance.

Unique value: Tailwind is great for Pinterest and Instagram marketers as it provides a range of features that are specific to these visual platforms, such as Pinterest content promotion and Instagram UGC content management.

15. SocialOomph

Boost your social media productivity

Prices: $6.97 and $17.97 per two weeks

Description: SocialOomph allows you to manage both your social media accounts and your blog from one dashboard. It has several additional features for Twitter management such as automations and follower management.

Unique value: What seems to attract people to SocialOomph is the Twitter automations and interesting features such as purging your tweets to restart your account.

The 10 top social media management tools for enterprise-level companies

If none of the tools above suits your social media strategy, perhaps you need something that is more comprehensive.

Here are several social media management tools that are generally designed for larger, enterprise teams.

(Most of these tools do not list their prices on their website but they do offer you a free demo to learn how the tool can help you.)

1. Sprinklr

The most complete social media management platform for the enterprise

Experience Cloud for Social Media Management is part of Sprinklr’s suite of products to help enterprises connect and serve their customers across any channel at scale. It enables teams in enterprises to collaborate effectively and to reach, listen, and engage their customers on more than 25 social channels.

2. Oktopost

The B2B social media management platform

Oktopost is a social media management platform catered for B2B marketers who want to generate leads through social media and quantify the business value of their social media efforts. From social media publishing to analytics to social advocacy, Oktopost has all the tools most B2B marketers would want.

3. Falcon.io

The platform for every kind of social media marketer

Falcon.io combines all the things social media marketers would need in one single platform: social media management, engagement, and analytics, customer experience management, and DIY landing page builder.

4. HubSpot

All-in-one inbound marketing software

HubSpot’s social media management tools are part of their all-in-one marketing software, which starts at $200 per month. As HubSpot integrates all your marketing efforts (such as social media, email, SEO, and CRM) into a single platform, you can easily compare your results across your marketing channels and measure your social ROI.

5. Salesforce Social Studio

Sell, market, and service with the world’s #1 CRM

Salesforce provides probably the most comprehensive set of products for enterprises. Its Social Studio, a part of its Marketing Cloud platform, can help you strengthen your customer relationships by aligning your marketing, customer service, and sales efforts on social media.

6. Social Hub

Helpful social media management software for your team

Social Hub is a social media management software built for businesses, agencies, and governments. Based on its target audience and customers, I believe it provides a solution that is efficient, scalable, and secure.

7. Spredfast

Enterprise social done right

Spredfast is a social media software that’s used by some of the world’s biggest companies, such as 3M, LinkedIn, and Johnson & Johnson, to handle all aspects of their social media management.

8. Likeable Hub

Easy & effective social media for your business

Starting at $299 per month, Likeable Hub provides you with thousands of content ideas, helps you generate referrals and leads, allows you to amplify your social media reach, and more.

9. Social Flow

Data-driven social media management, marketing, and publishing

Social Flow is a social media publishing and advertising tool used by many top publishers such as The New York Times, National Geographical Channel, and Fast Company. Using Social Flow, Fast Company was able to increase their Facebook shares by 30 percent!

10. NUVI

The world’s most stunning social media marketing suite

NUVI provides real-time data visualization and social media insights to help you make decisions on your social media strategy. It also provides you with the tools to publish and engage on social media efficiently.

What’s your go-to social media management tool?

Social media management tools come in all shapes and sizes, and what suits you best depends on your social media goals and needs. I hope I’ve managed to mention at least one tool that might suit your needs.

I’m sure this list only scratched the surface of the entire ecosystem of social media management tools. If your favorite tool is on the list, I would love to hear what you love about it. If I’ve missed your favorite tool (sorry!), please give it a shout out and share why you love it.

Thank you!

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Image credit: Unsplash

Thank The 25 Top Social Media Management Tools for Businesses of All Sizes for first publishing this post.