Grow Your Brand with Instagram Takeover Stories

What’s This All About?

If you haven’t thought of promoting your brand with the help of Instagram takeover stories, you certainly should.  To those who are clueless about what an Instagram takeover story is, here is the lowdown. All you need to do is to have someone who exercises major influence on Instagram to take over your account for a short period of time. You could then time this to coincide with them making a big announcement or engaging in a live Q&A with their fans-stuff like that.  An important point to remember here is that the stories disappear in 24 hours’ time, thereby adding a sense of urgency to the whole affair.

Not that the story of your collaborator will appear in your feed. Instead it will appear as a bubble at the top of your Instagram page that your followers need to click on to follow their story. Your own story will now be the secondary feed, but you get to grow the brand awareness of your product like never before. If for example you own a hair dressers’ salon try and organize an Instagram Takeover with one of your celebrity clients and see how that helps enhance your brand image.

Best Ways To Organize an Instagram Takeover Story

1.      Align with a product that has synergy with yours

For those in the business of cutting hair, it might make great sense to tie up with someone who is well groomed and has a sense of style. Streaming a day in the life of a person like that would do wonders for your brand, as you potential customers will expect that you will impart the same sense of style to them if they become your clients.

You can find a suitable person by checking their resume on Instagram and establishing contact through Instagram Direct. You could also put up a blank form on your Instagram profile inviting people who wish to collaborate to submit their details.  Do remember that in most cases such collaborators will expect to be paid, so keep a budget in mind.

 

2.       Clarify the terms of the takeover

It makes eminent sense for you to clarify the terms of the takeover beforehand to avoid any confusion. It would however be a very good idea to give the person taking over your account a free run with creativity, as the whole point of collaborating is to infuse new elements and energy into your outreach.

Say as a barber you tie up with a millennial to communicate with a younger target audience, it would make very little sense for you to give them a list of dos and don’ts.

 

3.       Work out the execution part

This is important. Instead of sharing access details of your Instagram account, it would make more sense to use a tool like Trello to share content. Alternatively you can ask your partner to share files though Dropbox.  You can also add your collaborator to the Instagram management tool Planoly that helps you to organize and schedule your posts.

A barber for instance would have any number of people as clients. Instead of taking a chance exchanging passwords, if one used a more secure method like the ones described above, one would feel reasonably comfortable about one’s Instagram  being taken over for  someone else’s stories.

 

4.       Plan and promote together

Though you might get lucky and collaborate with an ace marketer, who does all the heavy lifting and all you need to do is to sit back and relax, it does make sense to plan the intended promotion together. You both have you own sets of followers and know what would work best for you.

So plan the rollout of the stories together. If a barber’s clients are the sporty kind, it would work very nicely if the collaborator who is a sportsman agrees to give tips online. At the end of the day this is a symbiotic relationship which both the participants want to optimally leverage.

Instagram Story Takeovers are a fun and entertaining way of leveraging the power of exciting and interesting content that can help take your Instagram to a totally new level. You get to surprise your followers by introducing an interesting guest and in the process grow the brand awareness about your product manifold.