How To Use Instagram's Location Story Feature For Your Business

A couple of weeks ago Instagram rolled out an amazing new feature: They introduced location and hashtag stories on the explore page.
What does this mean for you and how can you utilise this for  your business?
Here is a story I shared earlier today with the location sticker of my town Guildford.  ​

Using the  location sticker gives my story more context. Anyone in Guildford can see the stories on their explore page in the Instagram app.

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Instagram randomly selects posts to be part of the larger Location Story and if your story gets selected and you have the chance of reaching to people outside of your followers which is amazing. You need to swipe up your story and check the stats to see if it was selected.
My story was selected. Now let's see how many people engaged with my post

At the time of publishing this post the story got 47 views and 41 of these were from the Guildford story! Bear in mind that the story is there for 24 hours so this number will increase. For comparison, you can see the story on the left which I shared yesterday,reached only 35 people as I did not use a location or hashtag sticker.
There is so much potential in this! If you have a cafe/restaurant or a local shop or if you are organising a local event, a training; you can reach the local people with this tool. You can reach the travellers in your area. If you are at a conference, you might be able find some people who you might want to network with.
Now let's click on the Guildford sticker and see what happens: It gives me the option of viewing the top posts.

There is a beautiful cake from a local blogger, a photo from a local music store, a local photographer, a floral farmer which I might consider to follow and engage with. As you can see it gives me the option of connecting with a variety of people in my town.
Similarly if you use a hashtag sticker, for example #Fashion #LondonFilmFestival etc on your story you can use that to reach people outside of your followers. 
​It is not out there yet, but if the rumours are true, soon there will be a search option within the stories.
​I hope this gives you some ideas about how to utilise the  Instagram Stories location feature for your business.
Read this if  you are not sure how to get started with  Instagram stories. As always if you have any questions or need help with your social media, just send me an email. 
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