One of the most under-used ways of sending someone to your business is an efficient use of links. We’re going to review two different ways to use links in an interesting way to drive more traffic (after all, we’re SumAll and we’re always thinking about fun links). Today, we’d like to focus on two competing tools – Instagram Stories and Snapchat. Instagram is, of course, owned by Facebook and gets a lot of development power from there and Snapchat is always trying to be the innovator in very short videos/ephemeral content.
We’re excited about the (very) recent launch of Links in Snapchat and here are a few ways to use both that and Instagram’s version!
So what are links in Instagram Stories OR Snapchat? It’s the ability to add a links to your short-form Snapchat or Instagram stories content and allows a user to swipe up and go to any link.
In the above example, there’s “See More” for Instagram stories and to the right, a paperclip graphic for Snapchat. Both allow you to add in a link that can send your customer base to a targeted URL.
Let’s go briefly through both types of links that we can add, starting with Snapchat’s new links that were released on July 5th, 2017.
How to create links in Snapchat:
- Open Snapchat and take an image or video.
- Press the paperclip on the right side of the image.
- Enter in an appropriate URL – in this case, we’re using our favorite URL: http://www.sumall.com
- Check to make sure that the URL links to the correct page (and if you’re using UTMs that you have the correct UTM)
Once you have links done, you can now easily add a pre-existing background filter or sticker onto your image (or turn any part of that image INTO a sticker).
- Trace the image outline, in this case of our little Alpaca friend.
- Choose a background from the toggle menu on the right hand side
- You’re done! Now you can add text or another filter over the image to make it brighter/darke etc.
- You can also see the paperclip in the lower middle of the image – that is your link.
How to create links in Instagram Stories:
With Instagram stories, you need to make sure your account is a Business account (not a personal profile – you can find this under “Settings”) and you must have over 10k followers. Instagram is slowly rolling this out to everyone (before you had to have a verified account to get links).
To create a link, simply take an image or Boomerang.
Click on the image that looks like a set of links in the upper nav.
From here, you’ll enter in a URL similar to above as with Snapchat.
Here’s 3 examples for 3 very different businesses. On the left side, see more will link you to a product. In the middle (Happy Birthday Ronald D Moore!), this Star Trek account links to a longer post. On th right side, Pixar is having you try to find an Easter Egg (a game) within the image and to “swipe up” for the answer.
Try Your Own Instagram Story! Take a picture, video or boomerang and try using the tags and tell us below if you’ve gotten more views on your content!