Instagram Stories Hacks: 12 Ways to Surprise Your Audience

If you promote your business on Instagram, you can no longer ignore stories with Instagram’s 300 million daily active users. It’s a great way to reach your audience, to build informal relationships and to show that there are real people behind your brand.

Why you should use Instagram stories:

• You can post whatever you want in stories. They don’t have to be as polished as the images on your Instagram feed and don’t necessary have to be in the same style. It’s a great opportunity to post “behind the scenes” content, so your brand will become more relatable.
• Instagram stories have cool features, for example polls, stickers, hashtags and they are constantly evolving. Moreover, you can easily measure their effectiveness as you will always see how many people saw your content.
• You won’t annoy your audience if you post a lot of content. Your subscribers would see your posts only if they want to.

We decided to share some Instagram stories hacks with you, so you can surprize your audience in an attempt to do something a little different.

1. Add more colors to your Instagram stories

You must have noticed that Instagram offers only several colors to use in Stories. However, there is an easy trick that will help you get access to a hidden palette.

How to add more colors:

1. Tap the “Aa” characters or a pen icon at the top right corner of the screen.
2. Tap and hold any of the colors.
3. Choose any color from the palette that appears.

2. Create ombre text

Ombre is a nice effect that will make your posts glamorous and eye-catching.

How to create this effect:

1. Add text to your story.
2. Tap and hold to select all your letters.
3. Choose the color you want and hold it. After that, a hidden pallet will appear.
4. Then comes the most difficult part. Unselect the first letter and go up or down slightly along the pallet. Do it for all of the other letters.

3. Use Instagram stories templates

If you need something extraordinary, you can use online editors with Instagram stories templates to create an image.

How to create an awesome story in VistaCreate:

1. Go to VistaCreate homepage.
2. Select Tumblr graphics format.
3. Choose a design, customize it. You can create several stories with a similar design with VistaCreate’s multi-page designs.
4. Download your story and publish it.

4. Create a drop shadow effect

You can create different font styles using your keyboard.

How to create a drop shadow effect:

1. Type a word or a message you want to share.
2. Type the same message in another color and move it slightly off-center to the first layer of the text.

5. Add punctuation marks to create geometric patterns

How to do it:

1. Click on the “Aa” characters.
2. Add punctuation signs like dots, tilde, plusses, and experiment with sizes. Now you have unusual patterns.

6. Create a box effect

In order to create a box effect, type several words separately and change the size of each word to make it fit into an imaginary box.

7. Add gifs

We love gifs. They provide additional information and emotion to a post. Swipe up in Instagram stories, tap on “Gifs” and type the word you want your Gif to relate to.

8. Add a solid background or transparent overlay

Have you ever wondered how people add a solid background to their posts? It’s easy!

How to do it:

1. Tap a pen icon and select the color you need. If you need a transparent background tap on chisel-tip brush and do the same.
2. After that tap and hold on the screen until it’s filled with a solid color.

9. Hide your stories from certain users

Don’t want your mom to see all of your posts? You can easily hide your stories from certain people.

How to do it:

1. Tap on the “Options” icon on the upper-left corner in Instagram stories.
2. Go to “Hide my stories from”.
3. Select people who won’t be able to see your posts.

10. Hide annoying stories from other people

You can make your feed more useful and save more time if you stop seeing stories from other people and business pages.

How to do it:

1. Tap and hold on the story you want to hide.
2. Select “Mute [username’s] story” in the menu.

11. Hide hashtags and location tags

Hashtags, captions and geotags will help you gain more reach, however, sometimes they can be pretty annoying.  There is a way to make your story cleaner and still reap the benefits of tags.

How to do it:

1. Add an image or a video to your story.
2. Add some text on a solid background.
3. Add a hashtag and make it as small as you can. Put it right on your text.
4. Bring your text to the front by tapping it.
5. Done!

Also, there are a lot of tips to make spaces in Instagram captions and bios written by Shane Barker.

12. Share public posts in your Instagram stories

Instagram has recently launched a new feature – now you can share public posts in stories. It’ll come in useful if you want to comment a post or collect user-generated content.

How to share a post:

1. Select a post you are going to share.
2. Tap an icon “share” under the picture.
3. Tap “send” and your story is ready!

We hope our hacks will help you create stunning stories that will surprise your clients and help you gain new likes and followers in the process.

Try to be different, use new features and you will acquire a steady flow of loyal fans.

Hungry for more posts? Read our updated social media marketing calendar for 2019 here.