Here’s What We Know About The New Instagram Story Update

Instead of story links showing up as a small button at the bottom of the screen where a user will swipe up, links will now be a sticker you can place directly on the story. The goal is to be more visible for users, and showing the link destination will provide more transparency.

How to Adjust to This Change

If you already had the swipe up feature and have been using this Instagram Story trend, here’s a few things to add to your to do list to make sure your Instagram is still in tip top shape, and aligned with this new Instagram Story update.

• Update all of your story templates. Remove swipe up call to actions, and replace with a space to place the new sticker and a new “click” or “tap” call to action.
• Go through all of your story highlights to check links and templates. This could be a good opportunity to refresh your highlights and make sure they are up-to-date and relevant for your current audience. Remove and replace anything that is referencing the swipe up.

While it seems like swipe up links still work in old story highlights, we don’t know for how long. Making this change is important to keep your content relevant.

What If You Have Less Than 10K Followers?

As we mentioned above, Instagram is considering rolling this feature out to all business and creator accounts, but they aren’t ready to take that jump yet. In the meantime, there are still two ways you can use links in your stories to help drive traffic. For even more detail on these tricks, we love how our favorite social media scheduling tool, Later, describes these tools on their blog!

Link Hack #1: Instagram Shop

Even though we can’t use Instagram Shopping to sell alcohol, it’s a valuable tool to drive traffic to your website. Add your merchandise, event tickets, or other non-alcoholic offerings. Once your shop is enabled, you can link to your products in your stories. This is an easy way to drive traffic to your online store, website, events, and more.

Lake Arrowhead Brewing Company has Instagram Shopping figured out, and uses the feature to promot their custom Christmas sweaters and other merch. 

Link Hack #2: IGTV

This Instagram Story trend is a little more challenging, but can really drive traffic if you use it effectively. IGTV captions can host multiple clickable links, and you can link directly to an IGTV from your stories with any follower count. We like Canva to create animated graphics with specific calls to action. Canva is one of our favorite free tools for all of our social media needs, but for this it’s great since it allows animated graphics to be saved as a video. Download the graphic as an MP4, and upload it as an IGTV. It just has to be between 15 seconds and 10 minutes long. Another easy idea is to record a video of yourself speaking your calls to action to foster the relationships and let your customers get to know you more.

Once your IGTV is uploaded, add a new story. Using the new link sticker tool, add the link to your story. For this method, we cannot stress the importance of clear calls to action enough! Make it very clear how your followers should find the links and what the value is for them personally.

A Winning Strategy With Any New Instagram Story Update

No matter how you’re using stories or what new Instagram story updates role out next, the biggest thing to remember is to stay consistent. Your relationships with customers relies on consistency and reliability. The more they can see behind the doors of your business, the more they will be excited to visit you and return for more.