marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 14 Highlights Unlike regular Instagram Stories that vanish after 24 hours, Instagram Story Highlights live permanently on your profiles. Because of this, they’re great for helping your visitors discover what your company is all about. They’re also the perfect place to direct your followers to your most valuable and interesting content. Instagram Story Highlights is an excellent forum for posting content from brand collaborations and takeovers. With the Travel Tuesday example, Airbnb posts a story with the same formula every Tuesday. Airbnb shares a few clues about their location via pictures as well as interesting facts and statistics. Then, they use a poll with the two destinations to choose from and ask viewers to guess the location. Later in the day, Airbnb reveals the correct answer. They then continue to share amazing photos of the given travel destination. This is wonderful for brand awareness because they’re reminding travelers about possible destinations with Airbnb, creating memorable engagement with followers every week at a normal cadence. Links If you have a verified account or are running a business profile and have more than 10,000 followers, you can add a swipe-up link to your story. Previously, Instagram was seen as more of a top-of-funnel awareness tool. Instagram Story Links gives you the opportunity to use the platform as a direct selling tool. When users link within their story, it creates a much smoother customer experience and brings them directly to the referenced site, rather than having them navigate to the bio before visiting the URL. Let’s look at Asos and their content highlighting Ray-Ban sunglasses. Here, people have the option of swiping up to shop. The Story Link makes it really easy for people to navigate to the product page and purchase directly from the site without having to click an additional link.