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How to Use Instagram Stories Countdown Feature for Your Business

How to Use Instagram Stories Countdown Feature for Your Business

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Wondering how to use Instagram stories countdown feature for your business? In this video we'll not only show you quickly how to use the Instagram countdown sticker in your Instagram stories, but also some great ways to use them to engage your followers and grow your brand. All right, let's get into it. 

What's up busy people? Welcome to My website. If you have been frustrated with your social media marketing, primarily because you feel like you're putting all this time into it  and not getting anything in return, you're in a great place. Every week we release a quick article to help you with a different piece of your social media marketing strategy. 

My name is Aris Pur and man, Instagram has been releasing features,  new stickers for Instagram stories so fast, including the Instagram countdown sticker. By the end of this video you'll know how to use the Instagram countdown sticker, and probably more helpfully, some great ideas that you can use to use it in your business. Including one way to use the countdown sticker as a contest that I haven't seen anybody use yet. 


How do you do a countdown on Instagram story?

 All right? So we'll get to that here in just a second. And by the way, spoiler alert, one of the things people can do when seeing a countdown in your sticker is choose to be notified when the countdown ends, which leads to all kinds of possibilities. I'm assuming you already know the basics of Instagram stories as you're watching this. If not, I've got a full tutorial on how to use Instagram stories and you can get that link in the description of this video. 

But first thing you wanna do is either take your picture or video in Instagram, or load it from your camera roll. So this is a graphic I created and loaded in here. And then I'm going to grab the countdown sticker.  So the stickers are all in this little icon on the upper right that looks like a smiley face on a Post-it note. 

I don't know if that's what it's supposed to be or not, that's what I always describe it as. Click on that, these are all my different possible stickers. Over here on the right it says countdown, that's the one I want. And it loads a countdown. The countdown name can be what you're counting down to, a question, whatever you want. So I'm going to just say this is gonna be a live lesson for Instagram. So let's just say lesson begins in. Then at the bottom of that countdown I'm gonna click set end date and time. 

So I tap on that. Go ahead and choose today's date when I'm recording this. And then underneath it says all day. If you choose all day,then you're just counting down to a specific day like your birthday or a holiday or the day you leave for vacation, whatever it might be. The timer will end at midnight local time on that day. 


If that's not what you want, turn that switch off and now you can actuallychoose a specific time. So I'm gonna go ahead and just set this for 6:00 p.m. And as you can see in the middle there, the numbers have started moving because it's go time, people. So this live lesson on Instagram is gonna be starting in an hour and 22 minutes. 

Now once you've got your time set, you can resize it, rotate it, move it, whatever you wanna do just like any other sticker on Instagram. I'm gonna go ahead and put it right down there. And then when you're tapped into it at the top, you'll see this color spectrum circle. I can tap on that. 

You cannot choose the exact colors that you want it to be, but there are actually quite a few options as you can see. So I'm gonna go back to the red one just 'cause I like that as a nice bright call to action. And then I'm gonna add one more thing underneath and that is going to be an additional call to action. I'm going to say click here to be reminded. 

And I'm gonna try and draw an arrow, I am terrible at drawing freehand. That's good enough, I guess. Hit done. Now I've got everything looking exactly the way I want it. I'm gonna go ahead and post it. Now I'm gonna switch over to a different Instagram account I have just so we can see it from an outside perspective. 

Here it is. I'm gonna hold the screen so it will not advance, but as you can see, the countdown timer continues to move. And you'll also notice there's nothing on there that tells the viewer that they can click to be reminded. So especially right now in the early days of the countdown sticker, that call to action where I said click here to be reminded is pretty important to get people to engage. 


So now I'm gonna tap that arrow and you'll see this pops up at the bottom. I can share the countdown to my story if I want, or I can click remind me. Reminder is one. And then when this countdown ends, I will, or whoever's viewing your story and asks to be notified, will get a notification. So that's how you can set up the countdown story. 

I wanna actually delete this since I'm not actually teaching this mini course.  Before, oh, two people have seen it, but before anybody else sees it. So what are some ways you could use Instagram's countdown sticker in your stories for your business? Well, for one you can countdown until you do a live video. If you do live trainings either on Instagram, or Facebook, or YouTube, or anywhere else, you can actually have a countdown to it. 

Now I will suggest unless the training is on Instagram, you might want to have the countdown end a couple minutes or five minutes before you actually start so they have time when their notificationgoes off that the countdown ended, they have time to jump over to whatever platform you have suggest that they go see your live training. 

Another thing you can count down to in your business is count down until your special starts or your sale. It's our anniversary sale, starts in three days, two hours, and 27 minutes. Maybe they wanna be notified the second the sale starts so they can get in and get great deals. Now the opposite of that would be a countdown until a special expires.

Although again, this might be one where you wanna actually have the countdown end a little before the special expires so they still have time once theirnotification goes off to go and get it. At the same time, counting down until the special actually expires, if it's that day, somebody sees it in a story and they feel like they see that ticking clock, it's like oh, I gotta go on there right now. 

It just kinda creates that sense of urgency. If you release products of any sort, you can count down until the release of that product, until it becomes available so that people are getting excited for it and that they sign up to be notified. When the notification goes off, they go oh cool, now I can go buy those shoes or that jewelry or that course. And the last idea I wanna share is actually a contest idea with a countdown. 

I've seen nobody use this, but I adapted it from my days working in radio. And that is to basically count  down until a contest starts. And you can say at the end of this countdown, remember how radio stations, I guess they still do, but caller 10 wins? The 10th DM I get wins this prize. Or if you have a huge following, maybe it's the hundredth DM. Don't do the first DM, because no one will assume they'll be the first, you probably wanna go with at least 10. 

But imagine all the DMs that you'll get if you run a contest like that. People will sign up to be notified, notification will go off, they'll dm you, and then you can go in and actually have a conversation with them. Oh, sorry, you didn't win this time. By the way, is there anything I can help you with in my industry? Or whatever it might be. Or hey, I checked out your profile and I love that you also love ramen noodles. You get to build relationships that way by getting them into your DMs. 

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