Instagram Stories Trends Shaping 2016

Instagram launched Stories on August 2, 2016, and the company didn’t hide where the idea came from. Co-founder Kevin Systrom said openly that the format was inspired by Snapchat, which had built its entire identity around disappearing, full-screen photo and video updates since 2013. What followed over the next few months reshaped how brands were posting for the rest of the year.

The format spread faster than most product launches Instagram had shipped before. Within roughly two months, Instagram reported Stories had already reached tens of millions of daily users, a pace that outstripped Snapchat’s entire user base at the time and made clear this wasn’t a minor feature test.

Brands treated Stories as the place for the unpolished version of themselves. Instagram’s main feed had, by 2016, become carefully curated, planned grids and edited photos. Stories, disappearing after 24 hours, gave businesses permission to post something rougher: a quick shot of a product being packed, a team member talking to camera, a countdown to a launch. That contrast, polished feed versus raw Stories, became one of the defining habits marketers built through the fall.

Swipe-up links arrived for accounts that qualified. Instagram rolled out the ability to attach a link that viewers could swipe up to open, though initially only for verified accounts and later larger business accounts. For the brands who had it, this solved a real problem: Instagram’s feed had never allowed clickable links in captions, and Stories suddenly offered a direct path from content to a website.

Geostickers and location stickers made local content easier to find. Instagram added location-based stickers in October 2016, letting posts surface to a local audience browsing a place’s Story feed, a useful tool for any business with a physical location or an event to promote.

Measurement stayed informal for most accounts. Instagram hadn’t yet built out detailed Stories analytics for typical business accounts by the end of 2016. Marketers tracked what was working the rough way, watching completion by how many viewers stuck around to the last frame of a multi-part Story, and paying attention to direct message replies rather than a dashboard.

The bigger trend underneath all of this was Snapchat losing its exclusive claim on the format it had invented. By pairing the same disappearing-content mechanic with Instagram’s much larger existing audience, Instagram Stories gave brands a reason to redirect budget and attention that had, until August, been flowing almost entirely toward Snapchat.