This week is National Storytelling Week and Instagram is the perfect platform for telling your business story. Whether it’s taking people back to where it all began or sharing the inspiration behind a new product or service, there are lots of ways to share a story.

Here are 6 we think you should try;

1. Use the caption to write your story

You get 2200 characters to write a caption when sharing a post to your Instagram feed. Why not make use of them and tell your followers a story. It has been proven that shorter captions are more engaging but we still recommend testing some longer captions with your audience too. Just remember to make the first two lines as compelling as possible to encourage people to tap ‘more’ and read your whole story.

2. Try a slideshow

They say photos tell a thousand words. If you have a series of photos that tell a story, share them in one slideshow post so people can swipe through them. You could show the process involved in making your products, the story of an event you attended or reveal a transformation. You get up to 10 photos or videos in each slideshow so there is plenty of opportunity to tell a story.

3. Make a video

Video is one of the best ways of telling a story, you only get 60 seconds for a video to your Instagram feed but it’s amazing how much of a story you can fit into a minute! Think about adding captions if you are telling the story as a narrative as not everyone will have the sound on while scrolling their newsfeed.

4. Tell a story using Stories

Stories are a great place for sharing a story on Instagram. Whether it’s just the story of your day or a bigger Story, you can use photos, videos, text, GIFs and lots more to make your story fun and engaging. Any stories you want to show your followers for longer than 24 hours can be added to a Story Highlights Album.

5. IGTV

Another great place to use video to tell a story on Instagram is IGTV. You will need to create your channel and then you will be able to share videos up to 10 minutes in length. This gives you much longer to tell your story. Just remember to record your video in portrait mode and make sure they are a little slicker and more edited than your Instagram Stories.

6. Go Live

Being yourself is important for great storytelling and there’s no better way to show the real you than talking live to your audience. Plus some of your followers will get a notification telling them you are live and anyone that didn’t catch the live will be able to watch it for 24 hours if you share it to your Story.

There are lots of ways of telling a story on this very visual platform. We’d love to know if you have any other ideas. Feel free to share them with us below.

Gemma Lloyd

Gemma is the founder of Social Mums.