More than 300 million users now use Instagram stories daily and posting your feed content to stories is a great way to boost reach and engagement.
In the feature’s launch blog post Instagram explained:
When you come across something in feed that inspires you — like a post from a friend raising money for a cause or a photo of a new design from your favorite brand — you can now quickly share that post as a sticker to your story for your friends and followers to see.
To share feed posts to stories:
- Tap the paper airplane button below the post (like you would to send a direct message)
- You’ll then see an option on the following menu to “Create a story with this post”
- Tap it to see the feed post as a sticker with a customized background ready to share to your story. You can move, resize or rotate the photo or video. You can also use drawing tools or add text and stickers.
Any post shared to a story will include a link back to the original post and include the original poster’s username.
Only posts from public Instagram accounts can be shared to stories. If you have a public account and would like to opt-out from letting people share your posts to stories, you can do so within Instagram’s settings.
In a recent episode of The Science of Social Media, hosts, Hailley and Brian discussed this update (around the 4:45 mark in the below audio):
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How brands can use this feature
Many brands and influencers already use stories as a way to drive attention to their latest feed and promote their latest posts. This update will be a welcome improvement to this process by allowing users to directly link to their latest feed posts, rather than taking a screenshot of a post and manually adding it to stories.
As Brian mentions in the podcast, this could enable brands to use stories as a way to cross-promote their feed posts to their audience on stories — people who may have potentially missed the post in the feed.
“One of the reasons we love stories so much is that it can be used as cross-promote content and now users will be able to go from stories directly to your feed,” he explained.
Hailley also drew comparisons between this feature and Twitter’s quote tweet functionality, where users can share content from the feed, but also add their own thoughts and context around it.
This is another exciting update from Instagram — following the share to stories and live video chat announcements at F8 — and it helps to better connect the feed to stories as well as providing a way for users to re-share some of their favorite Instagram content in a more public way than sharing with a couple of friends via a direct message.
These updates now available on Android and will be coming to iOS in the coming days.
What do you think to this release from Instagram? Will it change how you use Instagram stories for your business? Let us know in the comments ?
Check out another recent Instagram launch: IGTV: Long-form video on Instagram
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