Instagram Stories for a Business With Nothing New to Show

No new arrivals this week

A shop with new stock every Monday never runs short of Instagram posts. A business that sells the same service every week, or makes things slowly, often stops posting altogether.

The feed develops gaps of three or four weeks. Each new post is a finished piece, photographed carefully, and the owner waits until there is something worth that effort.

Stories work differently. They disappear after a day, they sit at the top of the app where followers look first, and nobody expects them to be polished.

That makes them the natural place for the ordinary days in between, which is most of them.

What there is to show

A business with nothing new to sell still has plenty happening. It just does not look like news from the inside.

• Work in progress, the job at the stage it reached today.
• The people who answer the phone and do the work.
• The questions customers ask, answered one at a time.
• Before and after, from the same angle and the same distance.
• The materials and tools, and why you chose them.
• The day starting, the doors opening or the van being loaded.

The third is the one that never runs dry. Customers ask the same few things every week, and every answer is a Story the next customer was about to need.

Work in progress, frame by frame

A finished piece is one photograph. The work behind it is a dozen: the state it arrived in, the first step, the problem found halfway, the detail nobody else would notice.

Stories play in order, so a job shown across a week reads like a short series, with the finished piece as the last frame.

Take the photograph while the work is happening, not afterwards from memory. Ten seconds with the phone at each stage is enough.

Questions as a running feature

The question sticker lets followers send a question from inside a Story. Each answer can be shared as a new Story, without showing who asked.

Questions also arrive by phone and at the counter. Answer one a day or one a week, in a sentence or two over a photograph that shows what the answer is about.

Whether a repair is worth it, how long a job takes, what something costs from: the answers are already in your head, and each one is a Story.

A worked example

A two-person upholstery shop in an industrial unit recovers chairs, sofas and boat cushions. Most jobs take two to four weeks, and nothing in the shop is ever new.

Its Instagram feed showed a finished chair every few weeks, and went quiet for a month at a time in the busy season.

The owners began posting Stories on working days instead: a chair arriving, the old fabric coming off to show the layers underneath, a frame being reglued, fabric choices laid out on the bench.

Every Wednesday they answered one customer question, starting with the most common: whether an old chair is worth recovering at all.

The finished pieces still go into the feed. The Stories fill the weeks between them, and the useful ones are saved as Highlights on the profile.

When customers bring in a chair now, some already know how the work goes, because they watched another one go through it.

Before and after, done honestly

Before and after is the strongest Story most service businesses have, and the easiest to spoil.

Take both photographs from the same spot, at the same distance, in similar light. A dim before beside a bright after looks staged, even when it is not.

Leave filters off the after shot. The point is to show the actual work, and a customer whose finished job looks different from the Story will remember the difference.

Ask before photographing in a customer's home, and leave out house numbers, family photographs and anything that shows where they live.

Highlights for what does not expire

Stories disappear after twenty-four hours, but any of them can be saved to a Highlight, a labelled circle that stays under your profile.

Highlights suit what new visitors need: how to book, prices from, the area you serve, answers to common questions, and a few before and after pairs.

Keep them short and current. A Highlight of prices from two years ago does more harm than having none.

A habit, not a campaign

Stories reward regularity more than effort. Two or three frames on each working day do more than a burst of twenty during a promotion and then nothing for a month.

Give each weekday a type: the week's jobs on Monday, a question on Wednesday, something finished on Friday. Deciding what to post is the part that stops people, and the pattern decides for them.

If more than one person posts, agree what is fine to show, and who checks the replies, which arrive as direct messages.

What to leave out

Customers' faces and names need their permission. So does anything readable in the background: an order list, an address, a phone number on a whiteboard.

Staff who would rather not appear should not have to. Hands, tools and the work itself make perfectly good Stories.

And be careful with Stories posted as they happen that show the owner is away, or that the premises will be empty for a fortnight.

The counter-case

Stories are not worth the same to every business.

A business whose customers are mostly other businesses may find them on LinkedIn or by email rather than on Instagram, and should put its effort there.

Some work cannot be shown at all, such as health care or anything inside a client's confidential premises. There, the people and the questions still work, but the jobs do not.

Stories do not replace the website, either. Links inside Stories are kept for verified accounts and those with ten thousand followers or more, so most businesses rely on the link in their profile.

For most businesses that sell a service, though, a few Story frames on working days are the easiest way to keep an account alive.

Starting this week

1. Pick three Story types you can repeat.
2. Give each one a day of the week.
3. Photograph work while it is happening.
4. Answer one customer question each week.
5. Take before and after from the same spot.
6. Save the useful ones to Highlights.
7. Ask permission before showing customers or homes.

Step two is what turns Stories into a habit. Once Wednesday means a question, nobody has to decide what to post, and deciding is what usually stops it.

Which numbers show whether any of it is working is covered in hidden likes and the business account.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.