CRUSH Instagram Marketing: Make Unique, Engaging Stories Easily!

1. Introduction: Hey there, my name is storm. I'm a graphic designer, photographer. And in this class I'm going to show you how to make engaging instagram stories that are professional and sets you apart from the crowd. And a lot of people who post on Instagram don't realize the power of Instagram stories. Maybe it's because they haven't seen any really great ones, or they think it takes so much work in editing software. But the beauty of the tools we're going to see today from Canva and also unfold, which is an app on your phone, are going to show you how to up your game. Now both of these, I'm going to show you free options and Canva, all of the templates we're going to use are going to be free and then unfold. There's free ones, but there are some more premium ones. If you're willing to move up to the next level and they're really cheap, this is going to be a lot easier than it may sound. So if you're interested, Let's get started. Hit Enroll. 2. Using Canva to Create Engaging Stories: All right, Welcome to the class. So first I'm going to show you a canva.com. The beauty of Canva is they have predesigned templates completely editable. You can change the text, change the photos, pretty much move everything around just as you want it so it can be uniquely yours. So let's hop onto the computer and I'll show you how to use it. So if you go to canva.com, I went to Instagram stories here at the top. If you go to the homepage, this is what you'll see first. So you'd be able to check out different marketing materials that you can make, whether it be cards, flyers, you name it. But for this course we're gonna do Instagram story. And there it is right there. And you're going to see all of the different templates they have. Now something to note is if you see this icon on the bottom right that says free, that means that it's free download. If you don't see that, you would need a premium subscription to Canva, which is pretty inexpensive. But if you're not looking at spending money, go ahead with the free ones. There's a lot of good ones. So I have three different templates I want to show you. Let's go to the first one. So the first one here, like this. So it's got this one here with this taped Polaroid with some text and you've got two different photos on the next page. We have fees with these designs. And of course you don't have to use all of these pages if you don't want to. But the beauty is it sets up a hall of these different pages for you automatically. And I'm just going to delete a few because I don't need all of these. I want the ones that look the nicest. This one's okay. Don't really care for that one or that one or that one. But I do like I like these three. So let's go ahead and zoom in here using the bottom slider. In first up, what I want to change this photo, the nice thing about Canva is they do have a completely free photo library. They have premium photos, but you can also use free photos. So if you go over here to photos and let's say I wanted to search for city. You're going to see all these photos, know a lot of these say Pro. So if you go to the Filters, scroll down, click Free, apply. Now you're going to see the free ones. So I'm gonna go ahead and let's say that this story is about a trip to New York. So if you click and drag the photo into the frame, there we go, positions it for you, but you can double-click to change the crop as well if you don't like exactly where it is, That looks pretty good for this example. If you did want to upload a photo, go to the left side, hit uploads, and click Upload Media, and then you'll do the same thing. But let's go down here and change the text so we'll do NYC trip. Let's do 2021. Now I'm also going to change the size of the text here, so you can do that up here. And I'm also going to change the font. There are premium ones here with this little icon, but there's tons of free ones. So let's just try out a few of them here and just see what they look alike. That one's kind of nice. I'm looking for something that's almost got this typewriter feel. This here. That one's not bad. Yeah, let's try that one. So I still too big. So let's try and change the size. I like that actually. Um, maybe a bit smaller so it can fit inside the Polaroid here. That's cool. Okay. You can always rotate things using the Rotate tool here. And then let's also go to these three dots and you'll get extra information so you have affects, animate, animates really nice because if you want to use this for a story, you can have it just appear or let's do that. The typewriter just like I was looking for. And let us do effects because this is where you're going to have shadow and things like that. Just change your effects here. I think I'm gonna go with echo. We go, That looks pretty good. And you can see the length of the story here. So if you've press play and we'll play it. And this is for the length of the entire story. So keep that in mind. And this will end up saving as a video file. So that's our first one down. And let's do this one here, and let's just change a couple more. So we'll do the rest of our photos. This one looks kinda cool. Like that. It is pretty saturated for the one that we had. So the one up here is desaturated. I want to match that field go to adjust and we'll go to contrast. Also saturation. A little bit less contrast even can go up on the brightness. That looks more like it would be a little more saturation. I guess. It looks good. Okay, Let's move on to the next one here. And let's just say we took this one. Okay? Again, saturation or contrast is a little too high. It looks pretty good. And then let's move on to this final one. And we'll put had time. Let's change it to that font we have. So when you use one, it's going to automatically a little to the top, which is really nice and convenient. Okay, I think all enemy, this one as well. Let's try i just that typewriters, nice. Okay, and then finally I'll add a final photo. And if it doesn't go into the frame, you'll wanna go back out, click on the image, and then drag it in, and it'll go into the frame. It looks pretty nice. Additionally, you can always change the background so I kinda like the the color, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for. So I'm going to change it to more of a gray. I think that's a lot better. Kinda goes along with our images. And when you're crafting your story, you really want to make it look cohesive, look uniquely yours, and just look interesting. And this is one way to do it. If you haven't an image or an asset like this, it doesn't show the color appear to change because it's more of like a picture almost. So what you can do to change the color on that would be the saturation and the tent. So let's say you wanted to change the color. You could do it that way. I really just wanted to make it a little less saturated. There we go. Okay. This one really doesn't go with that. That's another thing about your stories as you really want them to tell a story. So let's just have one final one here. Let's adjust it to get rid of that contrast. Brighten it up a little bit. And that will make what we want so we can play it to preview. And that looks pretty cool. Okay. Now you can change the length of each page by hitting this time and change the timing. I like what we've got though. Let's go ahead and download this one. So hit Download and you can change it to an MP4 video or GIF, I would say just stick with video because that's the easiest to use on a story. And then you're going to download all your pages and hit Download. And then it's gonna go ahead and download those. While that's downloading, let's head to the next one I had to show you. Now this one's pretty interesting. This is just a one-pager, but I thought this was a really unique. So it has, this is a totally free design, but it has these editable text spots and an image you can put on a phone and as well as a background. So let's kinda make this Rs. I'm going to click on the background. I'm going to make that dark. So we're going to change these elements. It's got a bunch of different colors in here. Try out different ones and see kind of what we want to change. As you can see, there's multiple assets within the same spot, same area. So that was kinda cool. Let's try. That. Looks good. Okay. So let's say we had a photo. Say it was like a portrait. And we'll go down here to free, so you can get free photos if you wanted to. Of course you'll probably have your own. But for this example, I'm just going to use the stock images since as you can see it has plenty. So you can put that in there. And then if you put text here, I can maybe say I'm promoting that I'm going to a certain place for a meetup or even that I have a sale and portraits, I can put running a sale on portraits. Check out the link in my bio to get in on this deal. And then or visit my website. So that's just an example. But now you can see that it's really uniquely ours. And you can also animate this stuff to get animate your text or the whole thing. So I really like the slide in types. Kind of like, oh, that's a little extra. Let's do this one. That one's really unique. Can play it to check it out. Okay, that looks good. So we'll go ahead and download that file as well. And here's the final one I wanted to show, just because here on camera they have multiple different options and this one's a little more minimalistic. So I did like this one. I'm going to just go ahead and skip these because I don't want all of these. Welcome to use as many as you want or add or take away as many as you want. But I really just like these two. So you kinda have this collage effect that's already built into the template. And the beauty here is, again, you can change the color. So let's say you wanted one black, one white. When you're making a story, you really want to make sure that it flows together. It's telling a story and it's really helping your brand or whatever you're trying to get across so that people know kinda what to expect from you because then they'll keep coming back. You'll you repeat followers in this case again, let's just say I was promoting portraits. So we'll do portraits again. We'll do this one here. If you double-click, you can change the crop. Do this guy here. Here we go. And it kinda frames the picture in the middle that way. And then this one down here is really cool. You can add some more photos here if people, Let's add city, since that's kind of our vibe and it's kinda cool. And this one, since that one doesn't really match the theme of this one, Let's go ahead and change it to something with more detail. Well, I really liked it on the background is pretty cool. We can change the effect here, so if we adjust it and do a blur, that's even cooler, so we'll stick with that. Go ahead and download and make sure it's in PNG because that's the highest quality file you can get. Or an MP4 file if it's like a moving video type. But that's how did we make stories using Canva? And now let's hop onto the phone and I'll show you how to use the app unfold in order to step up your story game. 3. Using Unfold to Make Your Story Unique!: All right, so let's talk about an awesome app I love to use, which is called unfold. Now this is great for stories, but also great for posts. But let's go ahead and hop into unfold. And this is an app made by Squarespace and they make some really cool, unique websites make it really easy to make them. And additionally, they do have a premium membership. So all of these ones on the left side of each row are going to be the free ones. But once you pay for a membership which is 299 a month, I believe, you get access to every single one. But the beauty about these is they're already formatted. Some of them have designs that fly in animated. So that's pretty nice. And you can just tap on them and edit the text and everything. I use this to make a story of my anniversary and different things because it was really unique. You can kind of mix and match these different ideas. But I'll show you how you can use this to make something really unique and interesting that really matches itself. So we'll start with something like I really like these film types. He's a vintage picture ideas, especially since they have the plastic and everything. So I'm going to start with, let's say, really like this one. So we're going to use this template and a lot of photo. And then you can tap on this little star icon at the top left to change it. Like adding filters are effects. Which is really nice. These here. Kinda cool. Like that VHS look. And that's pretty much it. So that's pretty cool. So let's go ahead and download it the top right, and you'll want to hit story on the right side and then two device. And let's go ahead and go back. And I wanted to add a couple more to this Instagram story, but I want it to be cohesive and kinda have this film feel. So that's one of them that was really nice. But I did see some others that were interesting, such as these up here. However, I am liking the real life feel. So let's go ahead and do something like maybe like this. And again, we'll choose an image. That's a cool one. For this example, we're going to stick with black and white just to keep things kind of in that vicinity. See like that. And you can change how it looks. If you double tap it, it'll change the repeat size. So download that it's story to device. And then finally, let's do something with a real film feel. So they do have some here that look like they were on a film reel. So we'll go and click on one of those. And this allows you to select multiple photos. Selected two images here of the snow will change it to black and white again on both of them. Here we go. Top right, hit Download story to device on the bottom left. And now we're done editing. So I'll show you how to post them to Instagram and give them a really unique feel. Now that we're on Instagram. The top-right tap on the plus icon inside square. And we're going to hit story on the bottom right. And then select our image bottom left. And let's first do these animated ones. So we have this one here, NYC chip 2021. And since it's a video, the nice thing about this is, is already going to have the timing just right. But something you can do to make your stories even nicer is used the effects at the top to draw it in. So you already made this animation, you already use these apps and you have these templates. But at the top, tap on the stars. And this is really going to help you step it up even further. So if you want to draw the eye in, some of these are really extra, obviously. But let's find something that's a little more subtle. So something like this could be kind of cool. And as you tap on them, you can just preview them and see how it looks and what kind of vibe it gives you. But you can see this already has more movement and draws the viewer a lot more in and kinda gives it this 3D feel. But you can kind of go through and see which ones really appeal to you the most. This one's kind of cool. But it kinda distorts the footage a little too much. So let's see if I can do something else. This one's nice and subtle. I like this one. So let's go ahead and hit Done. And of course you can always add things like text, so, but we already added texts before. So that's beauty of that. If you go to sticker. So you can hashtag were mentioned someone. So if you have someone who came with you and then someone will be able to tap this. And if you tap it once, it'll change it to black and white. And then on the bottom left you'll hit your story. And that post it to your story. So let's open it up and preview it. And this is what it looks like. Let's go ahead and add some more. So at the top right will tap Plus. And let's go ahead and add the other ones we have. So we have this one, which is really cool. So let's do story. Let's add this one here. And we're going to do the same thing with effects just because it really will add that interests. So here's what it looks like with no effects, which is nice and it's professional. So if that's what you need, go for it. But if you want to do something more artsy or more interesting, even something like that has a really good feel. But this really goes along with the theme. So let's hit Done your story at the bottom left. And now let's add our photo ones. So you've got a story on the bottom. Select multiple. Let's go ahead and add this. And this, this and this. I really like those the most for this story. So as you click along, you'll see your different photos if you click left and right on the, on the image on the screen. And this probably doesn't need, these probably don't need much effect. But if you add them individually, you can add an effect, otherwise you can't. So on the bottom right, we'll click the arrow, click Share to your story. And finally, this is what we have. And you can always add music if you want, either through Instagram or using the apps we talked about. And then if we just scroll along, and if you really like some of these, you can go to your page. You can add new understory highlight. And let's just go ahead and select a story and we'll call it in YC. And the beautiful thing about this is it will stay on your page. So if you want to highlight some of these in your story and allow others to visit and watch it later than 24 hours. This is a great way to do it. So I'm hitting highlight New York City. And now if we go over here, it's going to be saved here for as long as I want it. And that's a really good way to highlight something that you've made, but you don't want to let disappear. So when you're making stories, make sure they're engaging, make sure they kinda go together and flow. And this is just a really great way to step them up to the next level. 4. Class Project & Wrap Up!: Thanks for tuning into the class. I hope you enjoyed it and learned something. If you did, I hope you can give me a good rating, but I'd love to see in the class project your stories. So see if you can use one of these tools to create your story. Hopefully you've followed along and we're able to make something. I'd love to see it and we'd all love to see it. And hopefully this helps you just kinda move those creative muscles and be able to get in a groove where you can make professional-looking, unique looking stories. But until next time, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.