Apps You Need to Start Using to Take Your Instagram Stories Up a Notch

As a brand, you need to do a lot more than post a quality picture or video on your Instagram Stories to keep your Instagram followers engaged. With the platform seeing high growth with more and more businesses using it for their marketing efforts, it’s important to make sure you’re creating great content that draws in real Instagram followers and generates more Instagram likes for your profile.

Instagram Stories are a fun way of engaging with your audience, and with the popularity of Stories increasing 15 times faster than other content, it’s important to put your time, creativity, and energy into creating stories that can draw in your Instagram followers.

Today, this process has been made a lot easier with numerous apps making it easier for you to create engaging stories. Here’s a list of some of the best apps that you should get your hands on to set your Instagram Stories apart from that of your competitors.

InShot

InShot is one of the best apps that you can use to edit photos and videos for your stories, offering numerous design elements that your Instagram followers can’t get enough of. Using InShot, you can trim, crop, merge, or cut videos while adding backgrounds, special effects and filters to your videos. You can even experiment with music and other audio on your videos while fading the music in and out. A speed controller allows you to make videos in slow motion or speed up your videos. You can even adjust the aspect ratio of your video to make it suitable for various platforms. There’s a collage maker and photo editor that you can use and various enhancements through filters, text, emojis, stickers, and other icons can give your videos/photos an edge. Available on iOS and Android, InShot can be used by novices and professionals alike.

Canva

With Canva, you can benefit from more than 60,000 templates that you can use for the photos you want to post to your Instagram Stories. You can even make use of its stock images and get access to more than 1 million background images that you can use for your stories. The number of design grids, photo enhancers, vignettes, blurs, badges, stickers, icons, textures, and frames that you can choose from are sure to amaze you when you want to create a story that stuns your Instagram followers. Available on iOS and Android, Canva can also be used from your desktop.

Adobe Spark

The Adobe Spark is an app family with post and video apps that can take your Instagram Stories to the next level. Adobe Spark Post is supported on iOS, Android, and desktop systems while Adobe Spark Video is supported on iOS and desktop. Using it, you can add quality video clips or put pictures together to create a video story. There are many typography options, text cut-outs, effects, layouts and animations that you can add to your photos and videos. You can add audio from your phone or from Adobe’s collection and choose millions of stock photo options. Easy syncing also allows for cloud backup of your content and the best part is that you don’t have to be a professional designer to understand how to use the app.

Unfold

Available on iOS and Android, Unfold allows you to create quality images and videos for your Instagram Stories with the help of elegant yet minimalistic templates. There are 25 free templates and 90 premium templates that you can choose from with more than 5 types of font and advanced text features. You can give your stories a branded feel by using this app to edit your photos and videos.

StoryArt

This simple app, available on iOS and Android, gives you access to over 200 free templates and more than 20 themes with new templates being added on a weekly basis. Apart from this, you can also use its variety of fonts, design effects, themes, and filters for your Stories that can fetch you more real Instagram followers.

CutStory

CutStory is available on iOS only and allows you to cut longer videos so that you can create 15 second videos to meet the Instagram Stories requirement. It supports all formats of videos and can produce a stream of 15 second videos for you to be able to post to your Instagram Stories directly. With CutStory, you can also export your videos without having to compress them. This app overcomes the limits imposed by Instagram’s 15 second story requirement by making the task of cutting a longer video easy for you.

Lifelapse

With Lifelapse, you can experiment with stop motion animation and create animations that look professional just using your phone. It’s available on iOS and Android systems and also gives you the opportunity to add filters, stock music, and make changes to the play speed. You can also get your video timing right with the help of its interval timer to create videos that have high production value and can fetch you more Instagram likes for other posts on your profile.

PhotoGrid

PhotoGrid offers you the opportunity to create photo or video collages for your stories and is available on iOS and Android. There are over 300 photo collage templates, 60+ filters, and more than 90 backgrounds that you can choose from. You can make customised photos using its stickers, effects, filters, and fonts while choosing to clip an object from a photo or remove the photo background. You can even touch up profiles and selfies with its beautifying features or use its selfie camera and automatically have it touch up the image. PhotoGrid can help you level up on your Stories with the help of its meme and GIF generator, smart face filter, and scrapbook. It’s also compatible with several aspect ratios and can be used to create slideshows for your Instagram followers.

Hype-Type

Hype-Type is an app supported on iOS and Android devices and is one of the best Instagram Story apps for using text, offering numerous fonts, styles, and animations. You can use it with the photos or videos that you want to post to Insatgram Stories.

8mm

If you want to show your Instagram followers stories that have a retro touch, 8mm is the app that you need to use. It’s available only on iOS devices and can be used to add special effects even to already existing videos in your gallery. There are 8 different types of lenses, and 13 different types of aged and retro film styles. 2 free themes and 3 premium themes are available with a jitter button to mimic the frame shakes of 8mm cameras. The app supports HD recording up to 4K and allows you to live edit your footage while you’re recording.

Jumprope

Jumprope is the perfect app available on iOS if you want to create “how to” style content for your Instagram Stories like sharing recipes, fitness routines, make-up tutorials. You get personalised templates, and can make use of its filters, time-lapse, text overlays, colours, animations, and voiceover. You can also make use of a shoppable format to highlight your products for your Instagram followers.

Typorama

If you want to grab the attention of your Instagram followers with exciting text, iOS supported Typorama is the app you need to use. Using it, you will get access to more than 50 typographic styles and 100 fonts/typefaces. Choose a background that you like and start typing with its text styling tools. It also gives you access to several quotes that you can add to your Instagram Stories with numerous stock image options that you can choose from. You can even enhance your text using shadows, distortions, and gradients.

A Design Kit

A Design Kit is available on iOS devices only and can help you give your Instagram Stories an artistic touch. There are more than 120 designs and template options for you along with over 30 font choices. You can add stickers and backgrounds to your stories while using the brushes available to draw textures and colours.

Clipomatic

Clipomatic is an app available for iOS devices and is a great way for you to reach out to those with hearing impairment or just those who view Instagram Stories with the sound turned off. With Clipomatic, works spoken in your videos can be converted into captions live just by pressing a button thanks to its Smart Video Editor. It also offers several visual filters and typography options and can be used in 40 languages which can help you reach out to a larger audience and gain more real Instagram followers.

Microsoft Hyperlapse

Microsoft Hyperlapse is supported on Android and desktop systems and allows you to create time-lapse videos for your stories. You can also use it to adjust the speed of your current videos and increase the speed up to 32 times the normal video speed. The time limit for recording time-lapse videos using Microsoft Hyperlapse is 20 minutes. The app supports high resolution videos (720 and 1080 px).

Conclusion

Incorporating Instagram Stories into your Instagram marketing strategy can boost your business growth tremendously if done right. To take full advantage of the feature, you need to make sure you’re putting out excellent content and these apps can help to make that happen. Make sure you choose an app based on the features you’re looking to benefit from and one that you know how to use easily so that you start seeing the benefits of it through your Instagram Stories.