Using Stories

Instagram stories are short, 15 second clips that live at the top of your homepage when you open the app.

These will only be on your profile for 24 hours, so they’re are best used to highlight short bits of information. They do what they say on the tin: tell a story!

You can get a really strong audience engagement through stories if you use them effectively.

These can also be shared to Facebook and will come up on your CU’s Facebook page as a story.

Top tips:

• For good practice look at the virtual forum highlight on the UCCF account. This has a variety of different forms of story which keep your attention. It communicates all the information needed clearly and is also fun to watch.
• Stories work best in portrait. You can upload them in landscape, but they aren’t as engaging as people will need to turn their phones to watch. You may want to use an app like Unfold to make landscape more visually appealing.
• Interaction helps your audience engage with your story. Polls, quizzes, Q&A’s, etc! Ask your followers if they have any questions about life in your university city and answer them through pictures or short videos on your story.
• Think about how much text someone is going to be able to read in 15 seconds if you’re using it. Use text to highlight key information.
• You can share posts/IGTV’s from yours or other profiles in your stories to direct people to them. To do that click on the arrow next to the comment button on a post and select ‘add post to your story’.
• Tag your university or SU in your stories as this will allow them to repost to their own stories which is great promotion for the CU! Tag @UCCF if you like to share with others what you’re doing.

Making the most of highlights

Add the stories you want to keep into folders – called highlights – which will appear at the top of your profile.

Click the heart at the bottom of your story. These are great for grouping similar posts together so students can see what kinds of things you’re up to.

Highlights can publicise events or welcome and inform new students. Some top tips for using highlights:

• Cover photo – you can decide what picture appears as the cover photo for the highlight. You could use text to describe the highlight or use graphics. Keep all your highlight cover photos uniform and on brand.
• Welcoming new students – When you post your welcome video or info about your zoom call or anything helpful for welcoming new students, make sure to add it to a highlights folder that could be called ‘Freshers’, ‘New to CU?’ or ‘Start Here!’. It means all the info is in one place and, because highlights are at the top of the page, it makes it easy for new students to navigate and get more information quickly.
• Promoting events – You could create a ‘What’s Happening’ highlight where all your current event information is stored (make sure you clean this up regularly so you’re not promoting old events in this highlight.) You could also create a highlight for events such as Carol Services and Mission Week where you can add past stories from previous events to show people what the events look like.