Instagram has become one of the most used social media platforms among youngsters, and rightly so. Instagram has always taken a potential feature and made it popular, and it made Snaps into Stories and TikTok into Reels!
In August 2nd, 2016, Instagram released a ‘Stories’ feature to give its users 24-hour video and photo sequences that disappear like Snapchat.
In October 2016 (within two months), they had 100 million users interacting daily with their new stories. Instagram has been one of the most utilized and best applications for sharing photos and videos.
But there are days when we want to share our photos and videos with our followers but don’t want them on our Instagram profile grid.
Instagram stories do the job. The Instagram story feature stays on your profile for 24 hours and disappears into your Stories archive. You can also add it to Highlights if you want to save it.
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Instagram Stories are a feature that lets you share all the moments of your day, not just the ones you want to keep on your profile.
As you share multiple photos and videos, they appear together in a slideshow format: your story. Instagram stories let you share as much as you want throughout the day — with as creative as you can get, with words, stickers, gifs, emojis, and many more.
You can bring your story to life with text and drawing tools. The photos and videos will disappear after 24 hours and won’t appear on your profile grid or your feed.
You’ll see stories from people you follow in a bar at the top of your feed — from your best friends to your favorite popular accounts.
Their profile photo will have a colorful ring around it when there's something new to see.
To view someone’s story, just tap on their profile photo, and you can message that person on Instagram Direct or just like or react to their story.
The company reported that 500+ million daily users interact with Instagram Stories, up from June 2018’s 400 million.
It took Snapchat 6 years to hit 150 million daily active users, while Instagram stories and usage surpassed that milestone eight months from launch. Now, that’s what we call growth!
Learn more: Snapchat vs Instagram Stories for Business Marketing
11.01% of the world’s 4.54 billion active internet users access Instagram daily. It means that Instagram has an abundance of audience you can tap into; you just need to know how to use it.
The Instagram story dimensions are 1080px by 1920px, which is an aspect ratio of 9:16. What this means is that your IG story video or photo will have to be 1080 pixels wide by 1920 pixels in height.
The right dimension for posting photos on Instagram stories are 1080px by 1920px. The supported image file formats are PNG and JPG. Your Instagram story image needs to be fewer than 30MB in size.
Similarly, the correct dimension for posting videos on Instagram stories are also 1080px by 1920px.
The IG story video file size needs to be fewer than 4GB in size. MP4 (highly recommended) and MOV. Video files are the only two accepted Instagram video file formats.
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When you post a video or an image, Instagram recommends leaving some space by showing a blue line.
You must leave nearly 250 pixels of the bottom and top free from stickers, text, or other elements.
Why? Because those are the areas that are reserved for other vital elements such as the swipe-up button, profile name, or any CTA that people press to visit the link mentioned in the story.
So if you want to make the most of Instagram stories, it’s best to stay within the Instagram Story dimensions safe zone.
This reserved space for these particular functions is known as the Instagram story size safe zone.
Instagram is very strict about the size of your Instagram stories. So, if you upload a photo or video to your Instagram story that doesn’t fit the required dimensions, Instagram will crop and sometimes zoom into your photo or video.
This will cause a loss in quality and, occasionally, essential details being cropped off.
That's why you must stick to the correct dimensions. Below we have mentioned a few more reasons why you should care about sizes when you post Instagram stories.
Learn more: Social Media Video Specifications
IG stories are a great tool to connect to the audience on a personal scale. So the correct details and words are needed for the stories to create an impact and look good.
You must ensure the audience does not miss your story's point and vital details.
So you must ensure that your story caters to the proper dimension. It is crucial to ensure your story does not gets cropped off.
The story viewers must be able to see the essential details of the story like CTA, Links, polls, profile mentions, etc.
A video or a photo adheres to the correct dimensions, ensuring that none of the crucial details get cropped or go unnoticed.
Moreover, the visual appeal will have an impact on the audience and will scream that you mean business, thus making it profitable for your account.
An Instagram story template for your brand account will make it look professional and add to the brand's consistency.
A clear picture or a video with good quality and the right message for the right audience will have more views and more interactions, thus making it viral with the right audience.
Having the correct dimensions will ensure all your elements are visible, so the audience can see the CTA and take action.
Thus, it will help you communicate your motives better and reach the target audience effectively.
These are the few things you should keep in mind while posting your Instagram stories. These tips can help you create Instagram stories better; let's read on.
Instagram offers excellent pre-built and manually designed filters to make your photos and video look even better.
And with the thousands of options for stickers and reaction gifs, you can get all creative and quirky and add your taste that would fit into your vibe right away.
It’s always advisable to edit your video before uploading it to Instagram. Follow this analogy; you never good out poorly dressed, do you? So, you should also clean up your content before you upload it on Instagram.
But the best thing is that you can also upload pre-edited content on Instagram. You can use editing tools like Lightroom, VSCO, and Snapseed, to edit your pictures before you upload them.
Some tools, like Offeo Instagram Story Maker, also help you create animated stories. Thanks to Offeo’s readymade story templates, you can start creating Instagram stories in minutes.
Pre-edited content looks not only professional but also emphasizes your Instagram aesthetic.
The Instagram platform is vertical. Instagram was only about publishing square Instagram posts. But now, vertical content is the best for Instagram Stories.
From the moment you begin creating content for this format, you must remember that the dimensions suit the vertical content. The aspect ratio of stories should be 9:16.
Every content you shoot or create should be in a vertical format, so you do not get cropped out.
Instagram is a platform heavily based on photo and video-based content.
There’s a reason why the logo of the app is a camera.
Try using your best devices to capture your photos and videos, and ensure you always have enough vertical pictures for your Instagram stories.
You can use iPhone if you do not have a professional camera to click your images.
An iPhone, a good quality ring light, and a tripod must get you started with Instagram.
It wouldn’t hurt if you have a signature vibe or a style that’s unique and personal and you love incorporating that in your stories and posts.
Instagram offers you many options to choose from. After you get Instagram Stories dimensions right, you can think about making them more interactive and engaging.
It’s essential to start with the right idea and design, but you must also consider many other factors.
Consider in advance what kind of elements you want to include in your Instagram Stories and create content according to these ideas and the correct dimensions.
You can add the following to your stories.
Make a template with the correct Instagram Stories dimensions, update it regularly and at regular intervals, and share it.
You can create an Instagram schedule where you post one reel daily, two stories every day, and thrice weekly. But how do you schedule posting Instagram stories?
Your Instagram Stories will catch your audience’s attention with the right type of content and style.
While many people tell you what to do to have great Instagram stories, we will explain to you the story mistakes you should probably avoid.
For Instagram stories, you are limited to 15 seconds per individual story. But you can post however many stories you want.
Your main objective is to prevent the audience from swiping it away! The attention span of people these days have drastically reduced.
So make sure your story catches your audience’s eye within their attention span, and you can do this by keeping your stories short and precise.
Keep all you want your audience to see limited to 15 seconds.
Like every form of social media promotion, avoid doing it too much for your business or brand.
This generally means providing your audience with content that appeals to their senses and promoting your page or product.
They may get annoyed if you keep pushing your products down people’s throats. Offering deals, offers, or extra appeal is better before promoting your products.
Make sure you provide value for your audience. Then, even if you are promoting too much audience will like it because they will get something out of it.
The last thing anyone wants to see is a wall of text on their social timelines, so once again, be concise in your wording.
You do not want to hide your amazing picture/ video with a chunk of text.
Make sure you create quality content that is attention-grabbing and brings value and entertainment to the audience.
Avoid using too much text; use a short snappy caption if necessary.
A great feature of Instagram Stories is the ability for you to use hashtags that will help users across the platform to find your content.
You want to avoid using too many hashtags since this would look very congested on your story, but you also want to avoid using irrelevant hashtags.
Add a few story hashtags where it makes sense, creating your stuff worthy of discovery.
Are there some Instagram stories you look at and go, “Wow! How did they do that?.”
If you also want to wow your viewers, here are five killer Instagram story ideas from brands that have made it on Instagram
Mercedes has the most visually appealing Story Ads for its cars, and the 5 seconds are enough to spike up curiosity about what their next launch is going to be.
The colors and their use of the dimensions in story highlights the right way to make their stories so good.
We can never deny that the National Geographic channel has the most aesthetically pleasing photos in its stories and posts.
They make sure to add a little poll or trivia to ensure their viewers are engaged, which helps their audience grow.
They collaborate with leading female influencers and cater to a more female-centric audience.
Their stories show their brand objectives, making them an excellent example of what to do on Instagram.
Puma Women uses influencers in their IG stories to wear their products, and they do a great job incorporating the Instagram poll feature.
Although this poll may not get much valuable information, they still engage with their audience.
Buzzfeed is a famous website that primarily caters to everything related to Gen Z and Millennials.
Their story is mostly about their articles, but they make sure to add the most eye-catching parts and sections of their blogs, which makes their audience curious.
Thus, their stories serve as a great bait to capture their reader’s curiosity and get sufficient engagement for their page.
Last but not least, Marvel’s Instagram page and stories are the safe havens of the Marvel cinematic universe fans.
And they know this very well. So they advertise their merch and also make you part o their journey.
They make their business worthwhile and create a personal bond with their audience. Now that’s Marvel-ous…Isn’t it???
Your Instagram story should be 1080px by 1920px with an aspect ratio of 9:16.
The Instagram story dimensions are 1080px by 1920px, which is an aspect ratio of 9:16. What this means is that your IG story video or photo will have to be 1080 pixels wide by 1920 pixels in height.
To upload a photo/video that is not cropped because of IG dimensions, you need to edit it beforehand to ensure it's acceptable.
If you upload a photo or video bigger than the prerequisite dimensions, Instagram will crop your story to make it fit the pre-set dimensions.
Resize your story image to 1080px by 1920px and upload it. Also, you can use image resizing apps (photo editing apps) to resize a picture without cropping it.
However, resizing can result in lower image quality. So, check carefully before uploading it to your Instagram story.
We can say that Instagram has been a great part of our lives growing up. And the statistics in the above article prove how Instagram has been a part of the lives of millions of people.
Instagram stories can create a great impact if we can make the best of it! We hope you've learned something new about Instagram's story dimensions in this article.
There's more to learn than just these dimensions if you want to run a successful Instagram campaign. You can use many other features, settings, and strategies to get the most out of your Instagram account but more on that later.
If you'd like to share some of your knowledge, please leave a comment below.
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