Continue to discover why you need a style guide for your Instagram Stories…
5. Colors
Color is key to your brand identity. Utilizing color consistently in your Stories will assist to construct brand recognition and establish a particular style. Simply consider Starbucks and their signature green:
Your Instagram Stories style guide ought to embrace a listing of your brand colors, including where and once you use them. Embody your main palette (the colors of your logo and packaging, for example, that are most strongly related to your brand), in addition to secondary colors. The secondary colors may be more impartial or subdued, however, they ought to complement your main palette.
Embody particular HEX codes and RGB values for content material creators who could also be designing photos or working with templates (more on these below).
Tools like Canva additionally allow you to store presets with your model colors, which makes them simple to doc and share.
6. Apps and tools
What do you utilize to make your Stories look wonderful?
Whether or not it’s VSCO for enhancing your videos and images or Life Lapse for stop-motion-style Stories, your style guide ought to embrace these tools!
Include any presets or go-to filters and settings, in order that your teammates can nail the look and feel of your Instagram Stories.
7. Instagram Stories templates
Recommending particular apps will assist obtain an on-brand look and feel on your Instagram Stories, however offering templates will ensure perfect alignment.
You probably have multiple team members importing Instagram Stories, we advocate utilizing templates to create polished, constant content material (begin with our free templates).
There are a ton of apps for creating Story templates. A few of our favorites embrace Canva, Adobe Spark, and Unfold, which was utilized by Tommy Hilfiger to make this Story:
Include login particulars on your account in your style guide, so your teammates can entry the templates you utilize commonly.
Present tips for the utilization of each template. For example, in case you use a particular template for Stories about new blog posts, note it in your information!
8. Content calendar
Possibly you’re taking a spontaneous method to Instagram Stories, capturing no matter evokes you every day. We respect a free-spirited strategy!
However more probably, you use a social media content calendar to plan out your posts. That is valuable information if someone new is tending to your Instagram Stories for an extended period of time!
The content material calendar ought to embrace featured content for all your channels, like product launches and particular occasions. However, it also needs to have suggestions for any recurring or deliberate Instagram Story features.
For those who embrace common Story content on certain days (like Everlane’s Transparency Tuesdays or Basically’s Wednesday cooking Q+As), ensure you have these particulars outlined in your content material calendar.
9. Evergreen content material ideas
Whether or not you could have a calendar mapping out day-by-day (or week-by-week) content material on your Stories, it may be useful to incorporate information to your brand’s evergreen content material too.
Evergreen content material refers back to the posts that are always relevant for your audience. It may be repurposed to fill gaps in your posting schedule, or should you’re simply drawing a clean on what to share.
These could be your “best of” blog posts, your hottest interviews, and the images and videos that acquired the best engagement. You can too recommend user-generated content here, like posts from influencers that function your products.
Your style guide ought to embrace solutions and hyperlinks here for guidance, in addition to recommendations on what types of Stories perform greatest with your viewers. If you know your followers all the time loves a Story about your workplace’s cutest pup, that’s good intel to incorporate!
That way, in case your teammate isn’t certain what to post, they’ll have some stable concepts to attract from.
10. Posting times and frequencies
There aren’t any greatest practices for a way often to post to Instagram Stories, or what times of day you should post (not like posts to the feed, or other social media channels!) The important thing to success isn’t a magic variety of stories per day— it’s consistency.
For you, that may imply posting a number of Stories each day, or simply having a number of days each week where you post content material. For those who track your Stories analytics, you’ll work out what works greatest on your viewers!
No matter what you do, put it in your style guide. For those who typically post three Stories every day, it’s going to look weird to your followers if an overeager teammate posts 25.
When you’ve assembled your style guide, you’ll be able to take a break from your brand’s Instagram account with confidence.
It’d take a bit effort to place collectively, but it surely’ll save your staff a ton of time and fear down the highway! Most significantly, it’ll let all of you benefit from the process of creating and sharing great stories with your viewers.