Introduction
With over one billion active users, Instagram is a powerful tool for social media marketing. Instagram stories are becoming increasingly popular, and for a good reason – they are great for driving engagement and promoting your products, services, or brand. However, there is one issue that many people face when creating their stories – adding a link. Fortunately, adding a link to your Instagram story is easy and straightforward. This article will show you how to add a link to your story and provide additional tips and tricks to make the most of this feature.
A Step-by-Step Tutorial
Step 1: Accessing The Link Feature
To add a link to your Instagram story, you need to access the link feature. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to this feature. Instagram only allows accounts with over 10,000 followers or verified accounts to add links to their stories. If you meet these requirements, you should see a “Link” icon on the top of your screen.
Step 2: Pasting The Link
Once you’ve accessed the link feature, you can copy your website’s URL and paste it into the “Add Link” section. Make sure that you double-check the URL to ensure that it’s correct. If the link is incorrect, it could send your followers to the wrong page on your website.
Step 3: Customizing The Link Appearance
After you’ve pasted the link, you can customize its appearance to make it more attractive and engaging. You can change the text that describes the link, or even add stickers or GIFs to make it stand out. This customization helps attract your followers’ attention towards the link and increase the click-rate.
Benefits of Adding Links to Instagram Story
Adding links to your Instagram story can have numerous benefits for your business or brand. The most important benefit is that it helps drive traffic to your website. By adding a link to your story, you’re enabling your followers to directly access your site with just a single tap, eliminate the need to type the URL repeatedly in different tabs. Additionally, adding links to your story can also help increase engagement and improve your Instagram following. When your followers are intrigued by your content and follow a link from your story, they are more likely to come back for more.
Real-life examples of businesses/brands that have benefited from adding links to their Instagram stories
Several businesses and brands have used links in their stories successfully. One good example is Red Bull. They use their stories to promote their products and events and always add the link to their website for followers who want more information. By doing this, Red Bull can directly share their campaigns with their audience and drive traffic to their website.
Creative Ways to Add Links to Instagram Story
Gone are the days when adding a simple link would suffice. There are more creative and engaging ways to add links to your Instagram stories, using which you can enhance your stories. Here are some examples:
Using emoticons and creative visuals
Emoticons and creative visuals are immensely appealing to the eyes and can draw more attention to your links. You can add smiling emoticons beside the call-to-action to encourage click-throughs.
Using Swipe-up Feature
If you have over 10,000 followers, you have access to the swipe-up feature, which allows you to directly link a website on your story. This feature is very useful for businesses and brands selling a product that directly links to the product.
DOs and DON’Ts of Adding Links to Instagram Story
DOs
- Make sure links are directly related to the content to avoid confusion
- Use attractive visuals, GIFs or emojis to entice followers to click on your link
- Shorten your link to make it look clean and organized
- Use the call-to-action to direct your followers to the link
DON’Ts
- Don’t use links that direct your followers to irrelevant content
- Don’t use too many links in one story.
- Don’t use links to content that is not smartphone responsive
Troubleshooting Technical Issues
Some technical issues that you might face when adding links to your Instagram stories include slow speed or connection issues, links not redirecting to the right website, or your followers not being able to click on the link.
To troubleshoot this issue, you can try the following solutions:
- Switch to a better and more stable internet connection
- Test that your website link is working correctly and make sure that your website is smartphone responsive
- Make sure your followers are using the updated version of Instagram
- Save your link to your caption, in addition to your story to avoid losing the followers who miss the story
Instagram’s Latest Features and Updates
Instagram continues to add impressive features to enhance the user experience and optimize social media marketing. Recently Instagram introduced a tabs feature that helps users to sort their stories, whether by topic or date. This feature can make it easier for your followers to find the links when they want to access them later.
Conclusion
Instagram stories offer immense potential for businesses/brands to drive traffic to their website. By adding a link to your story, you can enable your followers to directly access your site with a single tap. Make sure to customize your link appearance, use call to action and attractive visuals to encourage engagement. Ensure to follow the guidelines and DOs to get the best out of it. Keep exploring creative ways to enhance your links, sort your stories, and make the most out of Instagram’s latest updates/features.
Give it a try and see how you can improve your Instagram marketing strategy.
