Instagram Stories: account growth AND site traffic…?

Interesting piece in Digiday from a few months back, talking about how Vogue has been using Instagram Stories to drive follower growth to its Instagram account:

The fashion brand’s U.K. account has doubled to 2 million followers in the last year, thanks largely to how it has honed its Instagram Stories and video output since December. Tubular Labs data shows the Instagram account had nearly 850,000 video views over the month of February. Of course, fashion weeks across the globe make this a big month in the industry calendar. The previous months saw the account fetch around 400,000 video views. For Stories, the publisher said it gets around 80,000 views per clip, with Stories usually containing half a dozen clips.

And they’ve been designing a storytelling language that allows them to tell specific styles of story:

Over the course of the year, British Vogue’s digital picture editor Alastair Nicol has hammered out a visual vocabulary for different types of Stories. Instagram Stories with an opinion — like how lacking the world will be without the Australian soap “Neighbours” — start with a strong, still image and graphics. Stories that are about beauty — like ones that highlight talent from the issue — are more fast-paced and pressing. Shopping Stories are more product focused.

Oh, and one other thing I got from the piece which I’d missed previously – verified Instagram accounts can add links to their stories. Finally, the possibility of traffic from Instagram opens up…