5 Instagram Story Games to Boost Your Engagement

Instagram stories are all about building relationships and encouraging engagement with your followers. If you aren’t using stories, it’s definitely time to get started with a strategy.  If you’re struggling to think of what type of content to post to your stories, Instagram Story games are always a great ice breaker. Ever since we started adding these games into our own strategy, we have been able to almost double our story engagement and reach!

Instagram Story Games Are Ideal For Two Reasons:

1. They boost engagement with your audience, and help them learn the personality of your business. It’s a playful way for your community of followers to get to know you, your brand, and each other.
2. Most of these games are designed to get your audience to re-share their answers to their own stories, which helps with your reach and discoverability. Yay, new followers!

Pro Tip: Make sure your handle is always clearly visible on the graphic of your Instagram Story games so when people screenshot to re-share, everyone sees your brand. 

How To Play Games With Your Audience

Playing games on your Instagram Story is pretty easy and doesn’t take a ton of extra effor for you! Here’s the quick and easy step by step you can use for any game you add to your story

1. Decide on what game you would like to play with your audience and how it aligns with your brand. Decide on clever/creative options that get people thinking about your products, brand or industry.
2. We love using Canva to create these games for our stories. Their templates are always a great starting point to give some inspiration if you’re feeling stuck. Search Instagram Story games directly in Canva to see specific game templates, then edit to make your own.
3. We like to post a “are you ready to play a game” slide as in intro.
4. For games where you are asking followers to screenshot and repost: First post your game slide with your answers, then the game slide with no answers so they can screenshot and reshare.
5. Reshare answers as they come in so everyone can see the fun, and encourage more participation! 

Here are 5 of our favorite Instagram story games to play with our followers.

This or That

This game is so popular because it is one of the easiest to engage with, and doesn’t take a lot of effort for you or your followers. Plus, it’s always fun for followers to compare answers with other followers and find their “unpopular opinions”. Pick a theme for an upcoming alcohol holiday, or make it specific to your brand. Bonus points if you can use it as a lead-in to announce an upcoming event or new product. Here’s an example we posted with a fall beer theme. 

Bingo

Instagram Story Bingo is another one that your followers will screenshot and share to their own story, marking off the boxes that apply to them. Make sure to have fun with these options. They don’t all have to be related to your product, just keep them relevant to your following. The more creative, fun, and generally appealing the options are, the more likely your followers will re-share it to their own story, which is the goal!

We used this example for October, and used it to lead into a Halloween cocktail recipe we created. 

GIF Challenge

Here’s another game that followers will screenshot and share to their own story. GIF Challenge is one of the more lighthearted Instagram Story games to play, where followers will use gifs to create visual answers to whatever prompts you choose. With the rising popularity of GIFs over the last several years, this one seems to be a fan favorite because searching through GIFs to find the perfect one is half the fun.

Truths and a Lie

Use Truths and a Lie to help your audience get to know you and your products more. Use the quiz sticker to post 3 truths and one lie. This is an easy opportunity to introduce new team members, or fun facts about your business.

Because our consumer-focused content is aimed at craft alcohol education, we choses these options to test their knowledge of the topics we recently posted about. Remember though, these don’t always have to be serious or educational. This Instagram Story game can be a great way to introduce a hilarious or outlandish fact about a team member or share what you did over the weekend in an effort to help your audience get to know you and your team better. 

Caption This

Post a funny photo from behind the scenes of your team along with a question box asking your followers to write a caption for the photo. Encourage them to be funny. Re-share the responses as they come in. You can even take this Instagram story game one step further and let everyone vote on their favorite captions. Top it off by offering a gift card or other prize to the person who wrote the winning caption.

Are you ready to start playing games with your audience now? We hope so! If you try out Instagram Story games for your account make sure to tag us in them. Why? So we see them and can play along to help increase your engagement! On that note, remember to tell your whole team to play along from their personal Instagram handles as well. This is especially helpful in the beginning as you teach your audience how to engage with you.  Let the games begin! 

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