A Business Guide To Instagram Stories — How To Use It And Tips For Success

Last week, Instagram launched its most significant and talked-about new feature to date –Instagram Stories.

This Instagram update allows users to share photos and videos in a slideshow format, which then disappear after 24 hours. Yes, you’re right, it does sound a lot like Snapchat.

Over the past 18 months, Snapchat has been at the forefront of a shift towards ephemeral, transient posting on social media. In this new era of social media, content is no longer curated, edited and scheduled; it’s fleeting and constant and everywhere all the time.

In the beginning, the instant video was brushed off as a micro-trend but the stats show that this is a force to be reckoned with. Snapchat boasts over 100 billion daily active users, with a staggering 10 billion snaps being viewed every 24 hours.

Snapchat has quickly grown to become the third most popular social channel, creeping up just behind Instagram and Facebook. So it was really only a matter of time before other networks hopped on this digital bandwagon and got in on the interactive video action.

In this business guide to Instagram Stories, you will find everything you need to know to use your Instagram account to its maximum.

YouTube Marketing: A Small Business Guide

As my series on using social media marketing platforms to market your small business comes to a close (check out past installments on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn), we arrive at what is possibly the most niche platform in terms of content: YouTube.

If you want to use YouTube to market your small business, you’ll be creating videos, plain and simple. While this seems obvious, it’s worth noting that while social platforms like Facebook lend themselves to creating, posting, and sharing a variety of types of content (videos, images, long-form text posts, short updates, and so on), creating content on YouTube means you’ll be investing your time in video production and video production only.

This note isn’t meant to dissuade you, but rather to point out that a strong interest in creating video content is necessary before jumping into YouTube. Don’t just start a YouTube channel in an effort to take advantage of all possible forms of social media marketing if you aren’t actually interested in making videos. The process of creating videos is time-consuming and has a bit of a learning curve, so make sure that this platform is one you really have time for and interest in.