Share content on Instagram using posts, stories, and reels, each offering unique tools for audience engagement. Understand the editing capabilities, interactive features, and visual branding options to make your content stand out.
Key Insights
- Stories and reels on Instagram allow for enhanced interactivity through stickers, which can include polls, mentions, hashtags, donation links, and music, features not available in standard feed posts.
- Image editing tools for posts include filters and adjustments such as brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth, vignette, tilt shift, and sharpen, enabling users to maintain a consistent visual brand identity.
- Reels offer a range of creative options, including trimming clips, adjusting speed, applying camera effects, and adding layouts, with the flexibility to download and share content outside Instagram, as taught in Noble Desktop’s digital marketing training courses.
This lesson is a preview from our Digital Marketing Certificate Online (includes software). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Okay, that's how you do a post of a single image. If I want to do a story, I can toggle over to story. Now, it first gives me the option of creating a story with the camera and filming something, but if I want to use an existing video, post, or image for my story, I just click on that photo there, and now I come back to my library.
So, we'll just use the same picture of the doggie, and now you have a number of options along the right side to add doodles, text, filters, stickers, and some of the things we're seeing on music or a post. But in addition to the editing option that you have on a post, you can also add stickers, right? And what do stickers enable you to do? Stickers enable you to add mentions and add somebody. So, here are your stickers.
Adding a sticker will enable you to add the location, the mention, identify the music, additional photo, a GIF, all things that are clickable and it will enhance your story with links that people can click to or additional information about the story, including the link, if it's a donation, if you're selling a product, hashtags, right? All that can be added to your story, but not to your post, right? So, that's one of the advantages of creating content in the form of a story. You now have these additional features that you can add to make it even more engaging or impactful, right? And once you've decided on how you want to dress it up, right, with any of these features, you can then determine that, you know, then you just press here and, you know, determine who gets to see the story and share it, leave it, send it in a message, right? So, that is your story. We'll discard that and go back to our main screen.
And now we're going to try a reel, right? So, we toggle over to reel. And again, if you are using a reel, if you want to post a reel, you can either click on your camera and shoot a reel, or you can pick an existing video, right? So, record a video by pressing here and then, you know, just as you record something or select a video from your gallery. And here for a reel, you can add text, stickers, or music, right? In the same way, you can do it on a story.
So, reels give you that option as well. You can write a caption and determine how you want to share that particular reel, right? So, the summary here is that with stories and reels, you have the additional features of adding stickers, whereas with a post, you know, a single post feed, a feed post, you will have, you know, you could add a caption, but you can't add stickers. You also tag friends, add your location, add emojis, but only on the stories and reels can you do the clickable elements such as stickers, right? All right.
So, posting a photo, right? We know that on Instagram, you can use Gingham, Claridon, you know, various filters. Here are all the ways that you can adjust your photo and edit your photo, you know, adjust to straighten it, brightness. We saw some of these contrasts, made the distinction between the dark and bright parts of the image, structured, enhanced the details, warmth, slide to the right to warm things up.
The other way you cool things down, saturation, adjust the intensity, color, lay on a color to either the shadows or highlights of the photo, fade, use this tool to make your photos look washed out, like it's been faded by the sun, right? So, just different effects, highlight, brighten or darken the brightest area of the image, shadows, brighten or darken the darkest area of the image, vignette, use the slider to darken the edges of the photo, making the image of the center look brighter by contrast. With tilt shift, choose either a radical or linear focal point, sharpen, and make the details a little crisper, right? And they do change these a little bit over time, but these are the main tools that you can use to edit your photos. So, play around with that, you know, what you want to do as a brand is develop a signature style and be consistent with that.
If you're going to consistently provide bright imagery, then do that, warm imagery versus cool imagery, that becomes a part of your visual branding, how you're presenting yourself to your audience, right? So, why, you know, what should stories be? They should be stories are the most intimate form of content on Instagram. It should be a look into your brand, you're able to use stickers like Bookstagram, which is one of the communities on Instagram, work mode, right? You know, sort of, you know, when people are being motivating about their work processes, right? Its work mode would be about their, you know, the work part of their life. Hashtag work mode, be proud of how hard you're working, right? You could do a poll, right? Do you like gluten-free desserts? Yes, no.
This is some of the ways that you can enhance your story with stickers, questionnaires in that case, and of course, we discuss music, and you could tell a story with story, which is why it's called stories in a way that could resonate with your audience, either taking them behind the scenes in your brand, how something gets made, a day in the life of, you know, just make, it's just ways that you can really engage with your audience in an impactful way, right? Recording reels, right? We discussed this. Once you create the reel, you can edit the clips to watch, trim, or delete the previous clip you recorded. You can add stickers, as we mentioned, drawings, you can actually draw on it, put the little squiggly line, text to your reel, and download it.
Once it's done, you can download it to your device and now share it outside of Instagram if you created it on Instagram, right? And then editing reels, right? When you record a reel, you'll see a tool menu on the left. You can tap, and again, we saw you can search for a song in your library. You can change the length of your reel. This will set the maximum length of your reel.
You can, you can find and add a camera effect, right? So, you swipe up to scroll to popular effects. I tap, you can change the speed of your reel. You know, sometimes you see videos that are sped up, reels that are sped up.
Well, that's, you can make it for one, one and a half, or two times. You can choose the length of your reel, the length of your clip, right? To change the layout of the reel, you can select a different layout. So, there are different ways that you can enhance your reel with Drudy's editing approaches.