Instagram tracks how long people view your story, and the more time they spend looking at it, the better it is for your page. Interactive stickers are a great way to catch and maintain users’ attention by giving them a quiz question to answer, a poll to respond to, or an emoji slider to swipe. These stickers are also a fun way to capture feedback on content and gauge your followers’ interest. They give people something to do with your story, rather than just something to view.

Easy How-To: Take a picture or video for your story and then click the sticker icon at the top to access all the interactive sticker options.

The majority of Instagram users (about 85%!) don’t turn on their sound to hear a video. So if you post content to your story that relies on audio, most followers won’t hear your message. A simple workaround is to add closed-captions – and it’s inclusive to your hearing-impaired users.

Easy How-To: Click the sticker icon at the top of the Stories menu, and select the  “Captions” option. This will automatically transcribe and display closed captions on your video.

Don’t forget about the low-effort options for keeping your stories updated! Sharing a post from your main feed to your story is a simple way to keep followers engaged and drive traffic to a new post. However, don’t overuse this method! Followers will get bored and start skipping over your stories, hide you, or unfollow altogether. After all, you want most of your story content to be creative and customized for Stories.

While Instagram does not (yet) allow you to organize your posts in any particular way, you can organize stories into categories at the top of your page with the Highlights feature. This lets you preserve your story content after it disappears from the top of followers’ feeds when the 24 hours are up.

Think of Highlights like tabs on a website, where people can learn about a specific product or service. There’s no limit to how many Highlights you can display, and each can contain up to 100 photos or videos. Take note that only 5 Highlights are visible at the top of your page before a user has to scroll, so be strategic about those spots.

Easy How-To: Click the Highlight button at the bottom right-hand corner of your story to add to an existing highlight (or create a new one).

Tag, tag, tag! Tagging locations and adding hashtags are two things that will ensure your story reaches a much wider audience. It establishes your content geographically, and helps associate it with certain topics. (Pro-tip: Consider making a fun hashtag that’s specific to your brand to use consistently). When relevant, don’t forget to tag other accounts so they can share your story to their followers as well.