Increase Your Instagram Story Engagement with Canva

Canva is one of the most useful tools that you can use to grow your Instagram account. And in this post, I'm going to walk you through how I'm using Canva to increase my Instagram story engagement. Without further ado, let's hop in.

Hi, my name is LaShonda Brown and welcome to Bootstrap Biz Advice where I teach you how to grow a biz without breaking the bank. If you're interested in reviews or how tos, this channel is for you. Just a quick reminder, a lot of the features I discuss in my Canva posts are based on using a Canva Pro account. If you would like access to Canva Pro free for 45 days, just go to lashondabrown.com/canva 45.

I wanted to do something different with this video and merge my biz advice with a Canva tutorial. So I'll take you behind the scenes and show you what's working well and then take you step by step through the process of creating designs of your very own. Now I've had a love-hate relationship with Instagram for years. For some reason, I would find myself constantly comparing myself to other people I saw in my feed. And after a lot of soul searching, I realized I was discontent because I wasn't owning my voice on my account. I was duplicating what I saw other people doing without truly knowing if it was even working for them. So I took a step back and decided to create my own system for posting to my stories in an engaging way. The best advice I can give you is if you want to see your Instagram story views increase, do more than just talk to the camera. I've heard so many people say that when they post stories with them just talking for an extended period of time, the views start to drop off. So what I do is focus on creating 15 to 30 second vignettes. Instead of thinking about the entire story for the day. Tell a variety of stories throughout the day and people keep coming back to see what's next. So less announcements and more vlogging. Another thing I've learned is people don't mind repetition. In fact, there's something comforting about those influencers who always pour themselves a cup of coffee or drink 12 ounces of water before they start their day. Now my equivalent is my morning greeting from the gym. I pick the same sound clip, do the same motion, and essentially use that pattern to start my day and start my story. Now I don't always work out at the gym in the morning, but I tend to never miss a Monday. So think about little snapshots or thoughts you can ask your audience on a regular basis to develop more of a habit of communication with them. I have my gym greeting. And I love incorporating a question of the day through a poll to get feedback on things I'm working on. Your audience loves to be included so I create different animated story graphics to place a poll sticker on top of to make asking questions more engaging for my community.

So now that you understand the strategy, I'll show you how to create animated story graphics in Canva to help boost your views, and your audience engagement. Now remember, the graphics are just the base, you still want to tag people when it's appropriate, add stickers, gifs, links and of course, don't forget music. Now let's hop over to the computer. And I'll show you four styles of story graphics that perform well for me. If you're new here, you may not know this, but back in the day, I had something called the VIP vault. And the reason why I created it is because I wanted a central location for me to share things that I was creating to help you and your business journey. Now I take some time away from that and I'm happy to announce that the Bootstrap Club is back. So I'm going to show you how I created these graphics but I'm also going to make them available as templates within the Bootstrap Club. So what you need to do is head over to lashondabrown.com/jointheclub to get access to the VIP vault. All of these examples will be in there along with stock photos, PDF guides, all sorts of amazing things. So moving forward, that is what we're going to do if I think it would be beneficial for you guys to have access to the things that I demo, it's going inside the Bootstrap Club. So make sure that you join the community so that you can easily create graphics like this to increase your engagement on Instagram.

Now, what I like to do is design my graphics on the desktop version of Canva and make small edits on my phone. So when I use this particular template, the things that I tend to change are the time, the date and the actual question. These are super easy to change on the mobile app and then export as a video. So if you look in the top right hand corner, you can see that this is 15 seconds long, which is currently the longest you can make an Instagram story. There have been talks about allowing you to upload up to 60 seconds uninterrupted but as of the time of this video, that hasn't happened yet so I like to keep mine to 15 seconds. If I click play, you can see a few things are animated in this, the question mark kind of bounces up and down. And then I use the typewriter effect for the text at the bottom. So what I tend to do is to make those small edits, create my question for the day and then add the poll sticker. I find that the poll sticker automatically increases my engagement and asking a “This or That” question makes it easy on my audience. As soon as I give them more than two options, my engagement drops. So my quiz stickers are lower, my sliders tend to be lower, because technically there's so many options between left and right. If you want to make it easy for yourself, ask a question, give a lot of context in this section, and put a brief description on the left side and right side of the poll sticker to make it easy for people to vote. This is a way that I choose topics for my videos, help make decisions in my business, and just let people feel like they're involved with the behind the scenes look at how I'm doing things. So that's my favorite one. Question of the day is one that I typically put at the beginning of the day. And people tend to love that, because they can see the results of actually engaging. So if you're going to use these types of graphics, make sure that they actually have an impact. And you're not just doing it for the sake of doing it. And the trick is you want to vary things up as you're posting. So if you post a boomerang or if you talk to your phone, integrate these graphics within your Instagram story to help retain your audience longer.

The second example is actually one that I would take a screenshot from an email and then add it as a sticker on top of the graphic. So this is another one with the time and the date but for this, I tend to place on top, comments that people leave when they support my channel through buy me a coffee. So if we go to my buy me a coffee page, you can see that they can choose to be anonymous, or they can choose to say their name, and then say a little comment about why they chose to donate to the channel. And so when these emails come through my inbox, what I'll do is just take a screenshot on my phone, and I can easily overlay it on my phone on top of this graphic. And when you click play, what you're going to see again is a very simple graphic, but this time, it's just the video background that's moving. I used a Canva video in the background. And I just lay that little notification on top. And the reason why I do that is because I want to keep it top of mind that if people want to support me, I am always open for support. And so constantly posting those notifications is a way to keep either Patreon, Buy me a coffee, or whatever you use as like an online Tip Jar top of mind for your audience on Instagram to support you and another way. So that is the graphic I use for that that makes it super easy. I can also take the screenshot of their notification and throw it on top of a video to mix things up. But this is awesome because it's very simple. And it allows people to focus on the comment and the moving background just kind of makes it a little bit more dynamic. So I like that one.

Now the third one is probably my favorite if I were to be honest with you, because this is my version of an Instagram story ad that I'm not paying to run. So you can give Facebook your money if you want to or you can engage your current audience through the use of these little advertisements. So this is one that I did back in December, I decided to say, I'm going to host a webinar on how to generate passive income with affiliate marketing and I'm going to do it exclusively for those who've purchased a coffee from me as a thank you, just something to give back. What I did was a live zoom call, I answered questions after the presentation was over and I did a quick edit of it and from now on, every time someone buys me a coffee, they receive that recording as a thank you. And if you click on play, you can see again, it's 15 seconds long. I used the typewriter effect to make the script text stand out a bit more. And I did two different graphics, so that everything else would kind of standstill and just the script text would move. What I did is this graphic is 7.5 seconds, the other is 7.5 which means the total graphic is 15 seconds long. And not having a ton of stuff moving around, really helps people to actually read the graphic without becoming overwhelmed, while still making it dynamic. Now, what I also did is I added a click here, added the arrow, and actually put the link sticker to buy me a coffee directly on top of this. And the reason why I put this little graphic was to kind of remind myself where I needed to stick the sticker. So that was just a visual reminder, you can always just delete this and your version of it. But I love making little advertisements for things that I'm doing and integrating those within my Instagram story. I've seen other people use this to market their digital product shops or their service offerings that they've packaged. So sometimes you don't want to get on camera and constantly pitch yourself, but if you're just doing a super chill story, and you happen to throw in an ad every now and again, then you can start to generate more traffic to your websites and your offerings without having to give like this formal pitch. So this is just a good thing to have saved on your phone. So you can say okay, I need to make sure my digital products stay top of mind, maybe two times a week, just throw in that ad with some fun music, doesn't have to be the same every time. But use the ad and then link where people need to go to help increase your conversions and increase your engagement.

The last example I want to show you is very specific to an online event that I was a part of. But I want you to really take a close look at the concept behind the animated Instagram story. So this particular graphic was created to not only advertise something that I was doing, but also promote the people that I was collaborating with. What is so incredible about you taking the time to create a very polished, animated Instagram story is more than likely the people featured in it will reshare it. I can't tell you the amount of times that people have tagged me in graphics that just weren't up to par. And although I was appreciative of the shout out, I didn't really feel compelled to put it in my story. But if I see something like this, something that has my branding, my headshot, my name displayed well within the context of something really well done, then I'm way more likely to share it with my audience. And so what happens is when you create graphics that showcase other people, then you get your content in front of their audience. So when I hit play here, what it does is it actually goes through all of the speakers that were featured on this particular Solvv episode. We focused on how to leverage Instagram video to drive sales. I will link to the recording because it was fire and gave so much incredible advice, and it's only 15 minutes long. But the reality is all three of these incredible men reshared this Instagram story because it reflected them in a positive light and showcased their expertise. So if you are collaborating, you're a part of a summit or you get featured on a podcast, anytime that you co-create content with other creatives or other people in your industry, just take the time to create an animated Instagram story and tag them in it. And what I like to do is I'll tag the people and I'll slide the tags off the screen so you can't even see that they’re tagged unnecessarily so it stays very clean, but it allows them to easily reshare and add whatever text they want. So at the end of the day, when it comes to these animated Instagram story graphics, your goal is to break up your content throughout the day. Don't post everything at the same time, but you break up your content throughout the day, add that variation and it makes it way more engaging for your followers to watch. Integrate as many different elements as you can, you can add those gifs, add music, add engagement stickers, and when you do that, you will start to see that your audience doesn't drop off as quickly as when you're just talking directly to your phone. 

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Don't forget to subscribe and feel free to reach out if you'd like for me to train your team or your community on how to get more out of your Canva subscription.