Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

More than 15 million businesses now use Instagram worldwide and over half of those businesses are creating Stories every month.

Stories are an incredible way to connect with your audience in fresh and authentic ways. Who knows, maybe they’ll even become the new News Feed.

But creating attractive Instagram Stories can be challenging and time-consuming. We’d love to help with that!

We’ve teamed up with the team at Adobe Spark, an awesome free design tool, to share 10 Instagram Stories templates you can use to quickly create your Instagram Stories content...

However, with Instagram’s timeline now also algorithmically sorted and the aforementioned growth in engagement with video on the platform, it’s likely that these engagement rates will continue to rise.

It’s important to note that having a successful Instagram video strategy does not mean you’ll be able to directly transplant it to other networks. Although there are some elements that will cross over, and if the video itself is unique enough it will take off regardless, Instagram is very much its own place.

There will be differences from platform to platform, so assuming that the videos that you produce for your Facebook page will be immediate success on Instagram is a bad idea.

We took a closer look at Instagram videos in Spike to see what the most successful videos on the platform have in common....

...Up to 15 seconds of video, 13 custom filters, and a "cinema mode" for stabilization. Those were some of the features added to Instagram last week, instantly turning the popular photo-sharing app used by 130 million people into a video-sharing service. Within the first 24 hours of the announcement, over 5 million videos had been uploaded.Sure, some were of frothy lattes and the Miami Heat winning the NBA finals, but the new features have wider appeal than to just casual users.

As newsrooms are now relying on social media as a platform to discover and deliver the news, Instagram's new video features will add another piece of content into the mix for organizations: short, solid-looking video clips.Beth Bennett, assistant professor at The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University, believes this will be the next big thing for news organizations....

Last week, we looked at how content on Instagram has seen tremendous growth and engagement for publishers in the past year. We’ve looked at the top tactics for Instagram video as well, but how do the top media publishers on Instagram divvy up their photo and video game?

As video is an increasingly essential medium across social media platforms, how are these publishers using it on Instagram? We put 31 Instagram accounts from news publishers under the microscope. The data around engagement for the month of September comes from NewsWhip Spike.

Let’s start with a look at the top 10 media publishers of September....