What Are Instagram Stories

Unlike your posts, Instagram stories disappears after 24 hours (unless you save them to the story highlights, more on that later). Often, they're more candid and provide a peek into the real-life, behind-the-scenes moments. For an Etsy seller, stories can be a great opportunity to let your brand personality shine, share your crafting journey, and foster a stronger connection with your followers.

Best Practices For Instagram Stories

• Like Talking To Friends: When using Instagram Stories, remember they are mostly seen by people who follow you. So, even more than your posts, consider your stories a way to talk to your followers like friends.
• Relevance is Still Important: While stories give you the freedom to be more spontaneous, they should still be relevant and valuable to your audience and your brand. Let’s say you craft handmade candles: Documenting your process of selecting materials, testing fragrances, or crafting the candles can be intriguing for your audience. However, unrelated content, like what you had for breakfast (unless it's related to your brand or work), will likely not interest your followers or even confuse them.
• Sharing Your Posts: Another good way to use Stories is to share your regular posts or reels within your stories. This serves as a gentle reminder for your followers to check out your latest content. Instead of just sharing the post, you can offer a snippet of an interesting story about the post or share some extra thoughts about it.
• Let Stories Expire To Reset Algorithm: From my experience, if the stories don’t do well, let them expire naturally and then wait another day before you post new content. I find doing that help ‘reset’ the Instagram algorithm and increase the view of my stories.

Should You Push Sales Through Stories

Of course promoting your products and sales is important. But just like in your main feed, I’d recommend the promotional Stories not exceed 20% of all the stories you post. Nobody likes an account that feels like a constant sales pitch.

But you can make an exception if you are running a time-sensitive promotion, for example, during the Black Friday sale. In that case, you can consider posting 1 story that announce the sale, 1-2 stories to remind them of the ending time, and 1 story that gives a final call to the sale.

Instagram Story Ideas For Etsy Sellers

• Behind-the-Scenes Product Creation: Your audience will appreciate a look into the process of how you create your products. Whether it's the initial sketching phase, moulding, stitching, or the final touches, showing the intricacies of your work increase the perceived value of your products and showcases the effort behind each creation.
• Getting Supplies: Take your followers on a virtual trip when you go sourcing materials or supplies. It emphasises the authenticity and the handmade nature of your products.
• Customer Appreciation: Sharing photos or reviews from happy customers is a great way to show appreciation and also build trust. When doing so, you can write a short paragraph to give some extra context of the product.
• Share Your Posts with Extra Insights: As mentioned, you can share your new content in your story with some extra relevant information.
• Opinions and Discussions: Stories can be a great place to discuss topics related to your niche. Sharing opinions can position you as an expert in your field and give your followers some interesting insights.
• Polls for Follower Input: Engage with your followers by setting up polls. If you're unsure about a design choice or product colour, you can set up a poll to see which one gets a better response from your followers. It makes them feel involved in the creative process and also let you get valuable feedback.
• Q&A Sessions: Sometimes you can run a Q&A session where followers can ask questions about your products, your creative process, or even personal questions (as long as you're comfortable answering them). It's an effective way to create a sense of community with your followers.
  

Using Highlights To Keep Stories Visible

Sometimes there are moments or information that you’d like to keep available for a more extended period. And those information fits stories better than the main feed. Then that’s where Story Highlights come into play.

Not only can you keep them visible after 24 hours, you can also group them into categories so that visitors to your account can get the right information quickly.

Story Highlight Ideas

• New Arrivals: Save the stories about the new products or lines you’ve introduced. It can serve as a quick peek into what's fresh in your store. Remember to update the selection of stories regularly.
• Product Categories: If you have a diverse range of products, you can create separate highlights for each category. This will help potential buyers quickly check out the products they are most interested in.
• Testimonials: You can also collect all the reviews and customer photos you’ve shared in your stories in one highlight.
• Collaborations: Highlight any products or projects that you've done with other creators or brands.
• Media Features: If you’ve shared the mentions you get from different media or blogs, you can keep all those stories in one highlight. It's an great way to build trust for your shop.
• Behind the Scenes: Similarly, you can keep all the behind-the-scene stories in one place so that shoppers who are interested in your products can view them.

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To design highlight covers, I’d recommend going to Canva to search for “Instagram story highlight”. Simple and clear works best here, and you can choose the ones that includes a simple icon on a coloured background.

If you can’t find the perfect ones on Canva, you can go to flaticon.com to browse their huge selection of icons, or to creativemarket.com to buy packs of Instagram story highlights.

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