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By the end of this episode, you will know exactly how to get your most viewed Instagram story possibly of all time. And while pretty much nothing is guaranteed on social media, this is as close to a guarantee as I can get. And I say that because the strategies that I'm going to be sharing with you in this episode have proven to be effective. Within our Insta Club Hub, 97% of the most viewed stories, as reported by our members, were following the strategies that I'm about to share with you today. So, of course there are always exceptions and outliers, but the blueprint that I'm about to give you is almost foolproof. But before we get into that, we need to make sure that we understand and are on the same page about the purpose of Instagram stories. And don't skip this part, because this is important. Instagram stories are a unique kind of content that exists unlike any other kind of content on any other social media. Instagram stories since their inception have been all about personalized, raw, authentic, genuine, in the moment content. Unlike Instagram reels that are scripted and edited and filtered before upload, Instagram stories are supposed to be the opposite. Instagram stories are about documentation, not creation. And so because of this, Instagram stories are the best place on Instagram, maybe the best place on all of social media, to build trust with your audience. And they do that because it's kind of like dating. Your Instagram followers can tune into your story day after day and see these little peaks into your daily life. They can see what you're going through, what you're struggling with, the highs and the lows. They can see all of the different interests that you have. If you're someone who hates the idea of niche, you should love Instagram stories. Because on Instagram stories, you don't really need to have a niche. The people who are viewing your stories are the people who have already followed you. They already know your niche. They already know the value that you provide. And now they're tuning into your Instagram stories to peel the curtain back a little bit and get to know you on a deeper or maybe more personal level. And so, with that being said, for the vast majority of the time, I recommend using your Instagram stories for exactly that purpose. I don't think most of the time, your goal on your Instagram stories should be to maximize views. Instead, I think that you should strategically maximize views when you have a launch or a sale or a promotion or a message that you really want people to hear. When you have a post that you really want people to see. That is when you want to get the most views possible. If you are using the strategies that I'm sharing with you today on every single one of your stories, day after day after day, it will have diminishing return. Many of these strategies will lose their luster. They will become less special and thus less effective. And so while initially you might have a huge spike of views that will go down over time, and eventually you'll be left right back where you started. And these strategies won't work at all. So most of the time, let's say 75% of the time or more, I don't want you to follow the strategies that I'm sharing in today's episode. I instead want you to just focus on documentation. Taking little photos, little videos, little boomerangs throughout your day, sharing posts that inspire you, sharing quotes that get you going, sharing struggles that you're dealing with and triumphs that you've achieved, the big and the small, and just being honest so that people can get a window into who you are. But with all of that being said, I know that's not why you clicked on today's episode. You clicked on today's episode because you're like, brock, tell me the facts about how do I actually get my most viewed story ever? And I'm going to do that in just a moment. But before we can talk about the strategies that will actually boost your stories, I need to share with you the things that you are probably doing right now as we speak. Like, I bet if you pull up your Instagram story right now while you're watching or listening to this, you might have already done some of these things, and these things are actually hurting your story views. So you could do everything to build the perfect car, but if you're slapping cheap wheels on it, you're not going to get very far. I could give you the strategies to run the fastest mile of your life, but if you're wearing flip flops at the time, you're not going to be as fast as you could. So here are the five mistakes that I recommend that you stop doing on your Instagram stories because these will hurt your views. Number one is sharing feed posts to stories. This one can often be very confusing for people because sometimes I will recommend sharing your feed post to your story. So please allow me to explain. Essentially, there are different strategies to achieve different goals. If your goal on any given day or with any given feed post, reels, photos and carousels, is to get the most views on that feed post, well, then I would recommend sharing it to your story. If you have a reel that is a promotional reel, if you have a reel that is a sale, if you have a reel that you want to get a lot of views, share it to your story. But in doing so, I also want you to understand that your story views for that day will be lower than what they could have been if you didn't share the reel. On the other hand, if your goal on a particular day is to get more story views, you don't necessarily care if you get the maximum possible views on your reel, but you really want the maximum possible views on your story on that day, then do not on that day, or anytime around that day, before or after, share your feed posts or anyone else's feed posts to your story. It doesn't matter if it's a reel, a photo, or a carousel. It doesn't matter if you posted it or if someone else posted it. And if there is a feed post shared onto your story, your story will most likely get less views. And not to get too lost in the weeds here, but basically Instagram did some sort of focus group or internal study a few years ago, and they found that a lot of people reported back saying that they don't enjoy seeing feed posts on stories. This is an oversimplification, but basically people go to stories to watch stories, and they go to the feed to watch the feed. Now, I know there are exceptions to that. I know that there are plenty of people who are really like when they see a reel or a photo or a feed post shared on stories, because it's like, oh, hey, I wouldn't have seen that otherwise. That's a great reminder to go watch it. I get that. But generally speaking, this is what the focus group told Instagram. People don't like seeing feed posts on their stories. So if you don't want to hurt your story views, don't share any feed posts to your stories. Speaking of sharing the stories, the second thing that will hurt your story views is resharing someone else's story to your own. Now, there are two different versions of this. The one version has been around for quite a while, and that's when someone else tags you on their story. So let's say you're hanging out with a friend and they tag you and they're like, hey, hanging out with such and such. Beach Day, whatever. Or let's say you're speaking on a stage or you have a podcast or whatever, someone tags you on their story. For the last few years, you have had the option to add to your own story, with just a click of a button that Instagram pops up, you can reshare their story onto your own. This is a great way to say thank you. It's a great way to provide social proof of, hey, look, all of my followers, these other people are tagging me, I spoke at this event or I had this great podcast and other people are posting about it. And so it kind of can create a little bit of FOMO or social proof. Those are the benefits of sharing someone else's story to your own. But like I said, doing so will also usually result in less views. The second way to do this, the newer way to do this is with the brand new feature that I talked about in an episode just a few weeks ago, which is that you can now share stories. For the first time in the history of Instagram, you can share someone else's public story to your own. So if you go on Instagram right now, and I hope on the day that you're watching this, I have a story posted at the time. If you go to my Instagram story, Brock11Johnson, and you tap on that little paper airplane button, you could theoretically repost my story onto your own. Now, when you do this, it does not make it look like you posted my story. Like, it doesn't look like it's your own story. It'll kind of be indented and my profile picture and my username will be up at the top. So it'll be very clear that you are kind of amplifying or boosting my story for your followers to see. But again, doing this will hurt your story views. So if you are really trying to get your story views up, limit the amount of story resharing that you're doing. The third thing that you are likely doing on the regular, that is hurting your story views is adding a link sticker to your stories. Now, I need to make sure that we're clear about this one as well. Instagram has no problem with putting a link sticker on your stories, but Instagram has a problem with how most people respond when you put a link sticker on your stories. Let me explain and I'll use easy numbers to make this very simple. Let's say you posted an Instagram story and you put a link sticker. Maybe it was an Amazon affiliate link, maybe it was a new blog post. Whatever. You put a link sticker with that clickable link on your Instagram stories. Let's say 100 people viewed your story within that first hour. And let's say that seven out of those 100 people were interested. You made a great case in point. And they clicked on that link. Those seven people are now going to the link. They're leaving Instagram, which some people have theorized Instagram is not a fan of. However, I don't think this is necessarily the case. I don't think Instagram really cares if they're clicking on a link to leave Instagram. But what Instagram does care about is the other 93 people. The 93 people who they weren't interested in the link. And so what did they do? They skipped your entire story, or at the bare minimum, they tapped on the right side of the screen to advance to the next slide. Both of those two forms of engagement are negative forms of engagement. They are signals to the Instagram algorithm that that viewer does not like the story that they're watching. That viewer is not interested in the story that they are watching. And so from the people who clicked on the link, you got zero engagement. And from the people who didn't click on the link, you got negative engagement. That is why stories that have a link sticker generally get less views. Later I'll talk to you about what do you do about this? How do you actually promote something? How do you actually get people to go visit a link if you're not going to use a link sticker? Spoiler alert. It's DM Automation. But we'll talk a little bit more about that later. And again, before we move on to the fourth thing that you should avoid doing. These are things that you should avoid doing when you specifically want to get the most possible views. These, these are not things that are like going to put you in Instagram jail. These are not things that you can never ever do. There are always exceptions. There are people who can get great views with a link sticker. There are people who can get great views by sharing their reel to their stories. There are always exceptions, like I said. But these are the general recommendations for what you should avoid doing when you want to get more views or the max views on your stories. The fourth thing that I would suggest avoiding on your Instagram stories is long talking head stories or really just long video stories in general. And again, the problem is not that Instagram is anti talking head stories. The problem is people have horrible attention spans and they get bored. Let me give you an example. You click on my Instagram stories and There is a 60 second long talking story, right? I'm telling you a story. I'm talking to the camera. I'm yapping away for 60 seconds. Y' all know I'm long winded. I get so many comments on these YouTube videos and podcasts saying, brock, you need to be more concise. I hear you. I'm trying to be as concise as I can, but I'm also trying to be as considerate as I can to the people who are maybe a little bit newer to Instagram and might need me to explain things multiple times or use analogies to better understand things. So I'm trying to walk that line. I'm sorry, I'm still getting better at being as concise as possible while still delivering the value that people can understand. But I digress. Oh gosh, I just did it right there, didn't I? Anyways, back to what I was saying. 60 second story where I'm just talking to the camera the whole time. If you're a viewer and you're watching that, the only way that you have to interact with that actual video is by pausing, by holding your finger down and pausing. If you mishear a word, if you misunderstand something that I'm saying, if you get distracted, if a bird flies by, if your kid screams and you look away. Now you are faced with the dilemma of either skipping the rest of the story and just accepting that, hey, I just missed it, or the only other option is tapping on the left side of the screen, going all the way back to the beginning and starting over. There is no way to fast forward or rewind on Instagram stories. There is no way to scrub through the video and select the exact moment that you missed or the exact moment that you left off on and keep watching. Also, there is that little timer at the top, and you can estimate how much longer is in the story, but there's no real way of knowing. When you click on a YouTube video, you know how long it is. And throughout the entire podcast that you're listening to today, you can look at the little timer at the bottom and see exactly how much time is left in the video. And but on Instagram stories, you don't really know. And so you're kind of just signing up, putting your blind faith in this creator, whoever it is that you're watching. And you better hope it's engaging. You better hope that you can stay engaged the whole time or else you're probably going to end up clicking away. And this is what we have all dealt with for years. And so we have all been trained now that when it's a really long video story, unless it's someone we really care about or a content creator who's just super captivating, we're probably going to tap through that story. Additionally, a lot of people watch Instagram on mute. And so if it's a long talking head story, they're faced with the dilemma of turning on their audio or maybe just reading your closed captions. Either way, it's not the best user experience. And so long video stories, long talking stories will usually hurt your story views. Similarly, but slightly different, the fifth mistake that people are making on their Instagram stories is over posting. Now, there is not an exact number that I can give you of. Once you post more than seven stories, you have over posted and your views will go down. But it's basically with each subsequent Instagram story that you post, the views will get lower and lower and lower for that first post and the views will get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. Significantly smaller for that final post. To say it another way, if you were to only post one story in a day, let's say that you could get a thousand views on that Instagram story. But if you posted two now that first clip is only going to get, let's say, 800 to 900 views and, and that second clip is only going to get 650 to 750 views. So now the max viewed story, which is the first one, has a lower ceiling. And each subsequent story after that, it has continued diminishing returns. According to some polls that I've conducted on my own Instagram, it seems that the sweet spot is about three to five. And once you start posting more than five stories in a 24 hour period, that's when people start to see all those little dashes at the top turn into little dots and then they start skipping. That's when people click on your story and they're like, whoa, this is long. I don't know if I want to sign up for this entire thing. And so they'll skip your entire story, which, like I already talked about, is a negative form of engagement. All right, you've officially heard all the things that you should not be doing on your Instagram stories. Now let me share with you the top three best things that you can do, the best kinds of stories that you can post to maximize your Instagram story views. And we're going to start off in third place with stories that get profile visits. What I mean by this is that the Instagram stories where when someone's watching your story, they click on your username up in the upper left corner and then they go and visit your profile. This is one of the reasons why political stories get so many views. When someone posts a strong political stance or opinion on their Instagram stories, it's likely that two things are going on. Number one, a lot of people are replying to either agree or more likely argue. We'll talk more about that later. But the second thing that's going on is, is that people are tapping on that person's profile. You're gonna hate to hear this to unfollow, but because so many people are tapping on the profile as their first action, Instagram sees that as a positive form of engagement and thus they boost the story up to more people, which means even more people are going to see it and even more people are going to tap on the profile and unfollow. Now, there are three main ways that you can get people to tap on your profile. The third best way is by encouraging people to click the link in your bio. I say that's the third best because I would rather have you put a link sticker on your stories, even though we already talked about that getting you less views. Or I would rather have you use DM Automation. Again, we'll talk more about that later than telling people to click the link in your bio. It's kind of weird. It feels redundant. It's like, why wouldn't you just give them the link right there? But maybe there was a specific reason why someone had to click on the link in your bio. Maybe there's a specific reward that they would get or a specific interaction that would happen when they clicked on that link in your bio. So. So that's one way that you could get people to visit your profile. As someone who cooks about 95% of their meals at home. And no, that's not an exaggeration. 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So it kind of creates a gamification where people will click on your profile to read your bio to win the game. And then the third and best way to get people to visit your profile is if there's a post that you want them to view. Now remember earlier I told you that if you're sharing a reel or any feed post to your stories, you will get less story views. So a creative way that you can get people to go and watch one of your posts, yet still use your stories to do so and not hurt your story views at the same time is by taking a screenshot of your Instagram profile, sharing that to your Instagram stories, and then circling or highlighting a specific post and telling people to go watch that post. Now, of course, you can turn on your marketing brain here, and if you just say, oh, go click on this post, you're probably not going to get very many clicks. But if you can create some fomo, some sort of incentive, a curiosity gap, if you can create a reason or some tension so that people want to go click on that feed post, well, then of course you're going to increase the odds that they do it. And then they're going to click on your profile, they're going to go watch the feed post. It's a win, win, win. Your story gets more views because it's getting more profile visits, and the feed post gets more views because people are clicking to view it from your Instagram stories. The second best way to get more views on your Instagram stories is by getting more shares on your Instagram stories. Now, for the last few years, you've been able to share Instagram stories. What I mean by that is you could see someone else's story and you could send it to a friend to view. But now, like I mentioned earlier, and like I mentioned in the episode a few weeks ago, you can take someone else's story and reshare it onto your own story, which really boosts the views. To give you an example, if I were to be watching your story and I sent it to my wife, it would get one extra view. Now, theoretically, the algorithm would say, oh, that's a great form of engagement. It got a share, and so it will probably boost it to more of your followers. But it's really getting one direct view, being my wife, the person I sent it to. But now, if I were watching your story and I shared it to my own story, anyone who views my story that day, whether it's 300 or 300,000 people, those views will count for your Instagram stories. Now, how do you get more shares on your Instagram stories? Number one, you have to tell people to share. I should have mentioned this when we were talking about getting people to visit your profile, but you have to explicitly tell people to visit your profile. You. You have to say, click on this button, you have to draw an arrow up to your username. You have to tell people a call to action to visit my profile. Similarly, if you want people to share your story, tell them to share your story and make it obvious. Especially since this is a newer feature, you're probably going to have to draw an arrow down to the bottom right where that share button is and tell people share this to your story. And probably give them an incentive or a reason why besides just telling people, Though, there's an acronym that I've come up with to help you remember what is a share worthy Instagram story. And the acronym is pretty easy to remember. It is share itself. S H A R E S stands for simple. Your story needs to be easy to understand. If it's super complex, if it's hard to read, if it's using big vocab, it will go over people's head, it won't hit home, and it will not be shareworthy. The H stands for hook. Just like a great reel, just like a great book, just like a great YouTube video or podcast, it has to start with a strong hook, something that's going to grab people's attention and actually make them want to stick around to watch the rest of your video or read the rest of the text on the screen in your story. The A stands for authentic, and there is nothing more authentic than an Instagram story. With most content, I say that authenticity comes from speed. Basically, the shorter time you can get between idea and execution or something that you want to post and actually posting it, the more authentic it'll be. With Instagram stories, it should be in the moment. With Instagram stories, it should be how you're feeling at that moment, what you're going through, the challenge or the triumph, the struggles or the wins, the I want you to share in the moment. And that will be way more authentic than trying to plan or script or use ChatGPT to write what your Instagram story is going to say. The R in the acronym stands for relatable. Relatability comes from specificity. So if you were to type an Instagram story telling us about your morning and you were like, I woke up and I had such a bad day and I was really frustrated. And then things got a little bit better, but then they got worse. But then I figured out this other it's so vague, it's not relatable. But if instead you were like, I woke up 15 minutes before my alarm went off, which was not a good thing because I already knew that I needed to catch up on sleep. But then five minutes later the fire alarm went off, right? And you're giving these specific details while no one else watching that story is likely experiencing the exact same thing, while no one else woke up exactly 15 minutes before their alarm that day. And then the fire alarm went off and all these other things. It's those specific details that paint a more vivid picture in our head and thus allow us to relate. Not to get too scientific on you, but basically when we hear a story, our mirror neurons are firing. And the more vivid of a picture that you paint by using more specific details, the more those mirror neurons can allow us to connect and relate with you as the creator. And then the E stands for entertaining. While there is plenty of value in educational content, it remains true that humans want to be entertained. They want to be captivated. And so when you focus on entertainment first, that will ensure that people actually want to continue viewing your story. Rather than just Three Tips to Being a Better Rock Climber Tell us the story of how you learned those three tips. Tell us the story of the mistakes that you made when you were getting into rock climbing. Tell us the story of one of your clients and how they overcame one of those mistakes rather than just giving us some more education. Also, generally speaking, shareworthy Instagram stories will fall into one of the five following categories. Category number one is inspirational Instagram stories. These are the powerful quotes, the motivational stories, the spiritual verses, the things that really made an impact for you. I want you to stay away from the overdone, overused cliches, right? If I post a story that says live, Laugh, love, it's not going to get very many shares. But if instead I put a multi sentence quote from a book that I just read that when I read it I had to sit down and close the book for a second because I was like, wow, that is powerful. That's the sort of story that would get shares. The second kind of story that gets shares is community oriented stories. And what I mean by these are stories that promote good causes, they raise awareness, they are promoting a charity or something that we need to pay more attention to. Those sorts of stories are kind of for the greater good and thus get more shares. The third kind of story that gets a lot of shares is relatable humor stories. Really just relatable stories in general. I know we already talked about the R in the share acronym, but memes and quick little sound bites and those sorts of things are oftentimes very share worthy. The third kind of thing that is very share Worthy is controversial stories. Now, I'm not saying that you need to call someone out, you need to be rude or political. And we actually already talked about how that can have a positive effect on your story views but a negative effect on your following. I just mean post hot takes unpopular opinions, debunk some myths. Those sorts of things can be very share worthy, especially when they're related to your niche. And they don't have to necessarily directly or always relate to your niche, but when they do, it will be likely more relevant to more of your followers. And then the fifth kind of story that is very share worthy, probably the most shareworthy of all, is timely Instagram stories. Timely Instagram stories are stories that have breaking news or they are relating to breaking news. So maybe you're going to break the news of someone winning a gold medal at the Olympics. That is a story that might get a lot of shares. But. But if you're not in the sports niche, if people don't rely on you for breaking sports news, instead maybe you're going to talk about the breaking news, you're going to talk about the person who won a gold medal at the Olympics and you're going to relate it back to your niche by talking about their hair or their style or their mental health, if you're in the mental health niche, or you're going to talk about their social media strategy if you're a social media marketer. It's basically taking something outside of your niche or adjacent to your niche and relating it back to your niche because it's breaking news. This is also what I like to call taking a nap. And nap is another acronym that stands for niche adjacent post. Again, it's taking something that the general pop culture society is talking about. Thinking about it, it's in the news. Maybe it's like the Chris Rock slap or the Coldplay concert where the CEO was caught cheating on his wife. Those sorts of things where everyone's kind of talking about it and buzzing about it. If you can find a way to relate that back to your niche and it will be timely, relevant and thus more share worthy. All right, with all that being said, the number one best way to get more story views, the way that you're going to get your max story views, is to create Instagram stories that get more replies. According to Adam Mozeri, the head of Instagram, Instagram is a place where friends can connect with each other in the DMs. They have a huge focus on direct messages over at Instagram because they recognize that business Owners and content creators like us are the ones who are posting on the feed. But friend to friend, people are interacting with each other in the DMs way. More, in fact, more content is sent via direct message every single day than is posted to the feed. And so, with this in mind, Instagram has tweaked their algorithms to reward stories that get people talking, that get people replying with direct messages. And so the number one best form of engagement that your Instagram story can receive is a reply. With that in mind, I have come up with a strategy with a very inappropriate name. It's named inappropriately so that you will not forget it. And this is the exact strategy to maximize your story views. And that strategy is called the STD strategy. Here are the steps in the STD strategy. Step number one, allow your existing stories to expire. I hope by this point in the episode, you know this already, but in case you don't, Instagram stories expire after 24 hours. What I mean by that is 24 hours after they were originally posted, they are no longer visible to anyone in your audience. They go into what's called your archive. So if, at the time of watching this, you Posted a story 17 hours ago, you're gonna have to wait 7 more hours for it to expire. You could delete your Instagram stories, however, I find it's usually slightly better to just allow them to expire rather than deleting them before their time ends. Step number two is where we get into the acronym. Step number two is to post a single story. S standing for single. And when I say single story, I basically mean one clip. Like I said earlier, the more clips you post, the less views you get. So I recommend posting one, a maximum of three, but ideally just one singular Instagram story. And that brings us to step number three. What should actually be on the story? Like, what should you actually post? It is going to be a text heavy story. That's what the T stands for, text heavy. And when I say text heavy, I mean multiple sentences of text. You could put it on just a solid background, but we found that stories that have a person's face in them usually get more views. So to facilitate this and make this happen, I usually will just take a selfie of myself where my face is kind of like down in the bottom right corner. I put myself down the bottom right corner so that I have more dead space, more open space on the screen to write my text. That's what we found works the best. And when I say text heavy, again, I want you to have multiple sentences of text. Usually if you're going to do more than three sentences of text in a single block, I will recommend putting a space in between it so that they're kind of like different paragraphs. You don't want to have like seven or eight or 15 sentences all without any break, because then when people view it, they're going to be like, whoa, that's a lot to read. And realistically, most people aren't going to be reading the whole thing word for word. They're going to be doing what most people do most of the time, which is skimming. And so if you break things up into one to three sentence chunks or one to three sentence paragraphs, it makes the skimming and readability much easier. As a pro tip, I will also often highlight certain keywords in a different color to really make them pop and stand out so that when people are skimming, their eyes can just dart from keyword to keyword and they can take in the whole story in a shorter amount of time. And when I say text heavy, you could do just a couple sentences of text, but you do want to do at least a couple. You don't want to just have one sentence or maybe even just a few words. You want to at least have, let's say, three sentences of text messages, because that will increase the watch time that people have when you post a photo story, which again, that's what this is. We're not posting a video story, you're not talking to the camera. This is just a single photo story. It will be on people's screen for three to five seconds. But if people see that text and they know it's going to take them more than three to five seconds to read it, they will hold their finger down to pause and read. Now I should actually pause myself right now and say that you need to know your audience on this one. If you have a younger audience or a more tech savvy audience, they will instinctually know that if they hold their finger down, they can pause the story and read it. If you have maybe a little bit of an older audience, a more tech averse audience, then you might want to put a little piece of text yourself that says hold here to pause or place finger here to pause or hold finger to pause and read something like that so that they know what they should do to actually pause the story. And then over time, if you consistently use the strategy, you, you won't necessarily have to do that every time because you will have essentially trained your audience to know that they can hold their finger down to pause and read. Now that we have the T, that brings us to the D, the most important part. You can't have an STD without the D. I know, that's super funny. Again, this entire strategy was named inappropriately and funnily so that hopefully you remember it. But the D is the most important part because like we've talked about already, getting a dm, a direct message, a reply to your story and is the key ingredient. Sure, it's helpful if people are holding down and they're increasing their watch time and they're reading your story, but if they're not replying, your story will not spike in views. You want to give people a specific call to action at the bottom of your story to reply with the word blank in order to get blank. And whatever thing they're getting, it should be something that's actually appealing or else they're probably not going to reply. If you just say reply for more info or reply for the link to my Million Dollar Mastermind, not very many people are going to reply. But if they're applying for a discount code or a freebie or a digital guide or something that's like really exciting, some news that they are dying to learn about, and you get a lot of replies, that's what will spike your story views. Now, theoretically, that's all you need to happen. And theoretically, you could have people reply with a specific keyword and then you could manually go in and reply to every single person. However, I ain't got time for that. And so instead, what I would recommend doing, even if you think you're only going to have a couple of people replying to your story, is to sign up for a tool like manychat that allows you to automate the response. This is what I mentioned earlier of DM automation. It's very easy to set up. You can turn it on so that when people say a specific keyword, they get some sort of message in response giving them whatever they were originally looking for. That is the STD formula. And then the final step in the formula is don't post anything else that defeats step one of letting your stories expire. Let that single story be the only thing up for 24 hours. Don't post anything else. No resharing from the feed, no video stories, nothing for the next 24 hours. And theoretically, that will be your most viewed story of all time. I forgot to ask you because I'm horrible at asking. If you haven't already, don't forget to hit subscribe because what we've seen is that over 70% of our regular viewers are not subscribed. So just quickly double check before you scroll on to the next video, double check that you are subscribed. And if nothing else, thank you so much for watching and as always, happy networking.
Host: Brock Johnson
Episode: Get 10X More Views on Your Instagram Stories in 5 Minutes – #878
Date: March 9, 2026
In this high-energy and no-fluff episode, Brock Johnson breaks down the most effective, data-backed strategies to dramatically increase your Instagram Story views—potentially 10X-ing them in just 5 minutes. Drawing from his community inside the Insta Club Hub, Brock reveals why maximizing story views should NOT be your daily goal and shows exactly when and how to deploy these powerful tactics without hurting long-term engagement. Listeners come away with a detailed blueprint (with Brock’s memorable STD acronym!) to create their highest-viewed Instagram story ever, plus critical mistakes to avoid.
[00:01 – 05:20]
[06:00 – 25:45]
Brock identifies five common mistakes that suppress story views, with detailed reasoning for each:
Sharing Feed Posts to Stories
Resharing Other People’s Stories
Adding Link Stickers
Long Talking Head Videos
Overposting Stories
[26:00 – 38:00]
[39:00 – 52:50] Brock's now-famous (and intentionally memorable) story-spiking tactic:
S: Single Story
T: Text-Heavy
D: Direct Message Call-to-Action
Final Step:
Result:
| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-------------|----------------------------------------------------------| | 00:01–05:20 | Purpose of Stories & When to Maximize Story Views | | 06:00–25:45 | Five Story-Killing Mistakes Explained | | 26:00–38:00 | Three Best Strategies to Maximize Story Views | | 39:00–52:50 | Full Step-by-Step “STD” Formula | | 46:42 | Design tips: text formatting and highlighting | | 51:10 | Critical final step—don’t post again for 24 hours |
Do NOT:
Do:
"If you want maximum story views, wait for your stories to expire, post just one text-heavy, selfie-based story with a compelling DM CTA, automate the reply, and let it stand solo for 24 hours. That's the viral formula. Then—go back to documenting real life the rest of the week." —Brock Johnson ([52:30])