Instagram Stories Features-What’s your next question?

Since the release of Instagram Stories last June, Instagram has added many features to easily engage and be approachable with your followers.  One of these features is the Instagram Stories Q & A sticker. Many brands have been using this feature to conduct market research in a less evasive way and engage with their community in a fun manner, and it also another way for brands to easily share user-generated content.

Example of Airbnb using the questions sticker to engage with their audience.

A few weeks ago, I decided to try it out with my Instagram account that I use for my lifestyle blog/shop Earl Grey Style.  While I already have a small community of people that I’ve engaged with over the years, I haven’t been as active over the past month.  The focus of my account is tea, nature, travel and eco-beauty. I have used the questions sticker in the past, but this time I wanted to genuinely find out what type of tea my followers like to drink.  I typed out the question “What is your favorite tea?”, added a photo that relates to my blog and shared it on my Instagram stories.  Users are then able to just type their answer in the sticker box and instantly send it.

My question sticker box shared on Instagram Stories

I initially had a few responses from a few close friends, which I expected.  One of the great features with this is being able to immediately share users’ responses in stories.  I shared my first three responses to the question and added a tea-related photo from my photos as the background photo.  One thing I noticed is that as I started to share more people’s responses, more people replied to my question sticker.  As my followers saw the other people’s responses to the tea question, they were motivated to share theirs as well and also have their content shared back.  Since stories expire after 24 hours, I posted the same question again and labeled it as Round 2.

Responses from Instagram questions sticker. By hitting reply, you are able to re-share the content or send a direct message to the users.

Below are examples of the question sticker replies that I shared on my stories.

I added my own tea-related photos from my collection to add more character to the story replies.

Another great feature with Instagram Stories is being able to save your stories and create a highlight on the profile page. I saved all the responses and labeled it Fave Tea? Overall, I was able to easily find out what my followers favorite tea to drink is and this gave me a better understanding of what type of tea to carry in my online shop.  I also ended up doing a spontaneous giveaway with the people who replied, and the winner received a box of their favorite tea!

Story highlights on profile and more examples of story replies that I shared.

I’m definitely going to be using this feature again to get a better insight of what my followers likes and interests are. Keeping the question simple and relatable makes it easy for followers to answer quickly as they are scrolling through all their daily faves. My next question will be “What’s your favorite city?”

I was curious to see if Starbucks uses this feature to find out what type of beverages their followers like and surprisingly, they are on board with the Instagram Stories game! Below are a few examples from their Story Highlights Coffee 101.

What questions would you like to see from your favorite Instagram Business accounts?