Instagram gives brands a new reason to invest in the production of high quality stories.
Brands and all other Instagram users can now submit collections of their old Instagram stories on their profile pages, the Facebook-owned photo and video platform announced on Tuesday.
Called Stories Highlights, these collections of stories from the past can be crafted from Stories articles that Instagram will automatically record in private archives accounts published by an account. accounts can disable this self-archiving feature. Brands can select the history publications to add to a selection of stories, name the collection and choose a miniature cover.
Stories Highlights will appear in a horizontal carousel near the top of the account profile pages above the gallery of photos and videos shared with the main stream of Instagram, and there will has no limit on the number of highlights posted on the profile page of an account.
Instagram will not include ads in Stories Highlights, and brands will not be able to register an ad in an article on Highlight, according to an Instagram spokeswoman .
For brands, Stories Highlights could help convert more people into followers by teasing the types of stories that a brand publishes. According to Instagram, 200 million people view at least one profile page of a brand, but two-thirds of these people do not follow the brand. Now the brand can use Stories Highlights to show them more of what they're missing.
Stories Highlights can also give brands more reasons to invest in better stories. Brands should never want to lose people's attention – especially when an algorithm determines how much attention a brand can tune – but the ephemeral nature of the Stories format can make it too easy for brands to find their way. 39, ignore the value of their content because it disappears after 24 hours. Now that brands can resurrect their stories in the highlights, they can be more encouraged to produce compelling stories.
For example, a retail brand might publish weekly stories that explore another of its brick-and-mortar stores – now that brands can collect these disparate stories, gone since in Stories. Or a television network that publishes stories related to its programs could group these stories into highlights of the program's own stories. And marketers or media companies interested in producing episodic stories, but worried that their ephemeral would mitigate the return on investment could now extend their life through highlights – and probably expand their audience.
About the author
Tim Peterson, Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has been reporting for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. Angeleno, born and raised, graduated from the University of New York, currently lives in Los Angeles.
He broke stories on Snapchat's advertising plans, Jason Kilar's attempt at founding CEO of Hulu, to turn to YouTube and assembling the ad-tech battery of Amazon; analyzed YouTube's programming strategy, Facebook's advertising ambitions and increased blocking of ads; and recorded the largest annual event of the VidCon digital video, the BuzzFeed brand video production process and the Snapchat Discover ads charge six months after its launch. He has also developed tools to monitor the early adoption of live applications by brands, compare search patterns from Yahoo and Google, and review the NFL's YouTube and Facebook video strategies.