Common Stories Marketing Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)
The recurring mistakes brands made with Instagram and Facebook Stories in 2018, and what to do instead.
Instagram said in mid-2018 that Stories had crossed 400 million daily users, more than the entire user base of Snapchat, the app that invented the format. Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger were all pushing their own versions of the same disappearing, full-screen, vertical feed. Businesses noticed the numbers and rushed in. Most of them made the same handful of mistakes, because Stories behaves differently from a regular feed post, and treating it like a smaller version of the same thing rarely worked.
Mistake 1: Repurposing feed content without changing the format
The fastest way to spot a business that hadn’t thought about Stories was a square feed image dropped into a vertical frame with white bars on either side. It looked lazy because it was. Stories is a full-screen, sound-on, thumb-driven format, and content built for a static grid post doesn’t translate. The fix is simple but requires actual effort: shoot vertically, design for the top and bottom safe zones where the profile icon and reply bar sit and assume the viewer has audio on.
Mistake 2: Talking at the audience instead of with them
Stories launched with polls, question boxes and sliders well before most brand accounts figured out how to use them. Skipping those tools and just posting a slideshow of product shots wasted the one advantage Stories had over a feed post: it was built for a reply, not a like. Accounts that asked a real question, then screenshotted and reposted the best answers, consistently got more completion through their story than accounts running static ads dressed up as content.
Mistake 3: No destination for the tap
In 2018 the swipe-up link was only available to verified accounts and accounts over 10,000 followers, which meant most small businesses couldn’t add one at all. That pushed some into pinning a single “link in bio” story indefinitely, which is a weak substitute. Businesses without swipe-up access got more out of directing people to a saved highlight, a DM keyword or a simple “comment below” than pretending they had a feature they didn’t.
Mistake 4: Posting in bursts, then going quiet
Stories disappear after 24 hours, so a brand that posted six stories on launch day and nothing for the following three weeks effectively vanished from that surface. The accounts that built a real following on Stories treated it like a daily habit measured in single frames, not a campaign measured in bursts. A few short updates most days outperformed a heavy push once a month.
Mistake 5: Ignoring Highlights
Stories that disappear are only half the feature. Highlights, the saved collections that sit under a profile’s bio, let a business turn its best Stories into a permanent, browsable menu, things like FAQs, testimonials or a product walkthrough. Accounts that never touched Highlights were throwing away content they’d already made, forcing every new visitor to start from zero instead of finding an organized answer to the question that brought them there.
What worked
Businesses getting real value from Stories in 2018 shared a pattern: vertical-first content, a genuine attempt to use the interactive stickers, a workaround for the lack of swipe-up when they didn’t have it, daily rather than sporadic posting and a Highlights section that did double duty as a mini FAQ. None of it required a production budget. It required treating Stories as its own format instead of a smaller feed.
Keep exploring: browse more Social Media Marketing guides, see everything we published in 2018 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
