There is no deniability that instagram is one of the most eminent social channels today to create visual content & generate engagement from your target audience. Other than the conventional posts, Insta stories have become a huge platform to showcase your creativity! I have received a lot of questions on some of the animations in my stories & hence I’m sharing 3 of my favorite apps for editing insta stories that instills my creativity to play with stories and make them more engaging! Most of these apps offer ingenious features without asking you to sign up for a premium version & hence I think you can make the most out of them with their basic versions. I follow a simple rule for my stories which I’ve abbreviated as ‘ARCS‘ –
Attractive– Visually attractive stories obviously draw more attention! Use the apps below to achieve this along with GIFs & emojis available on instagram.
Redirect– This is specially for folks with less than 10K followers, always reiterate about the Link in Bio or visit someone’s profile, shopping links etc.
Call to Action– Every once in a while, engage your followers with a question or ask for their opinion! You can use Instagram options like ‘Poll’ or ‘Slider’ for this, as well as ask them to DM you for something. This will also help you to analyze the ratio between number of people viewing your story to the number of people actually responding & will help you to improve your engagement ratio! I have a few examples for the same at the end of this post.
Short – Keep them simple & short! With so many stories popping up each minute, I personally think that people like get the gist of the message in a few seconds.
Here are my three favorite apps for creating & editing Insta Stories:
This is a user friendly app with a number of templates categorized systematically, which makes it really easy to find what your looking for! Here are a few stories that I’ve created using this app & a step by step visual guide for creating one!
Choose the appropriate template:
Replace the template picture with your own:
          
         
Edit the text, you can also change the font style, color & pattern:
       
       
Add effects if you like:
                  
The story is ready! Save your story to photo library:
                  
Here are a few stories that I created in Adobe Spark:
              
              
              
               
Canva has a lot more to offer than just creating Insta stories! The highlight icons on my Instagram handle have also been created in Canva. It is a great tool to create media kits for small businesses as well! Canva is super easy to use and offers great level of customization! Canva is missing the effects option like in adobe spark but you can combine the features of the two apps to create stories with best features from both the apps.
                 
        
               
  
I mainly use InShot to edit videos for my insta stories. The app offers preset filters, speed adjustments, text & sticker additions for the videos. Another great app for adding special effects to videos is Werble but the basic version has limited effects.
              
As I was talking about ‘ARCS’ at the beginning of this post, here are a few examples of making your stories more engaging with a call to action:
              
               
              
Hope you’ll find some of these tips helpful! If you have more tricks & tips on Insta stories to share, DM me on Instagram or comment here & I’ll be happy to share them! Happy Instagramming y’all! <3
