Instagram is one of the most used social media platform among US adults, and marketers have been upping their focus on utilizing the platform in recent years. As one of Instagram’s most popular features, Stories is used by 6 in 10 marketers and accounted for one-third of ad impressions in QI 2021. New data from Socialinsider reminds that while Stories are becoming more popular with brands, their reach remains lower than that of feed posts.
Per SocialInsider’s data, Stories reach only around half the number of Instagram users that regular in-feed posts do, and the average reach decreases as follower count increases. For example, smaller accounts with fewer than 5,000 followers have an average reach of 16.85% for feed posts, while Stories have an average reach of 8.43%. Similarly, accounts with more than 100,000 followers have an average reach of 8.53% for feed posts, compared to 5.30% for Stories.
In an effort to make their content more diverse, brands are posting more to Instagram Stories than before, with the median number of posts at 15 to 16 per month. In doing so, brands are continuing to seek ways to post content that captures and keeps their audience’s attention. In 2020, the tap-through rate — “the percentage of people who have tapped forward to see the next piece of content posted in the Instagram story sequence” — was 68%.
Overall, Stories with images appear to perform a little bit better than those with video. For instance, small accounts (up to 5,000 followers) have a reach of 10.4% for Stories with images compared to 9.37% reach for those with videos. The only outlier is accounts with 100,000+ followers, where Stories using videos have a slightly higher reach than those using video (5.03% for video vs. 4.95%).
In other insights from the report, Socialinsider found that Instagram users tend to tap forward sooner for image Stories, but exit faster from video Stories.
Read more here.
About the Data: Findings are based on 2021 data from an analysis of 962,402 stories from 6,014 business accounts posted between January 2020 and October 2021, along with an analysis of 148,328,654 Instagram in-feed posts published in the same timeframe.
