Are You Telling Your Story?

My last post was about an Artists Helping Artists podcast I did a few weeks ago about using Instagram Stories. I hope you listened to the show because I honestly think it's the hottest thing happening in social media right now.

With Instagram Stories, you don’t have to worry about overposting. Instead, you can share as much as you want throughout the day — with as much creativity as you want. You can bring your story to life in new ways with text and drawing tools. The photos and videos will disappear in your story after 24 hours and won’t appear on your profile grid or in your feed. 

Instead of the usual posting of carefully chosen single photos, Stories lets you post a bunch of photos that play like a slideshow. And as I just mentioned, at the end of the day, those photos disappear.

So why should an artist use stories? Stories is a perfect extension of instagram. It takes your audience from just seeing your Instagram feed to getting to know you. It kind of like “opening the door” to your studio. And gives you an opportunity for your audience to get to know you and your art.
 
Instagram Stories are intended as a space for more raw, real-time sharing. Stories go beyond the usual filter options—though those are there too—offering text, drawing, stickers, and other features for creativity.

So what are the practical ways you can use Stories to promote your art? Here are a few examples shown with how you can use Stories to enhance your Instagram post.

1. Let's say you want to share your art studio. So you post a photo of your studio on your Instagram feed and include a nice write up about it. Enhance this post by doing an Instagram Stories and share a video tour of your studio. Basically, you are inviting your audience in to your studio to see it close up. If you are shy you don't need to show yourself on the camera. Just show your studio and talk about it as you are filming.
2. Suppose you want to share a new painting. Now create a video on Stories with an in-depth explanation of how you painted it, what inspired you, etc.
3. Perhaps you want to post photos of the progress of a painting. On Stories you can share demo videos of your progress throughout the day. As you post the videos to Stories they will all be shown one after another, just like a movie.
4. What if you want to post to your Instagram feed about  a workshop you are teaching. Enhance that posting with stories – share video of your students work, what you hope to accomplish, etc.
5. Finally, perhaps you want to post about an upcoming show. On stories you can post video of  some of the paintings that will be in the show and discuss the specifics of each one.

Give it a try. It's the single best tool available to increase your engagement on Instagram! It's also a lot of fun and pretty easy to use. Be sure to let me know what you think.