Chapter 9
Being Sneaky with Sharing Stories
IN THIS CHAPTER
Sharing other people’s stories to your own
Limiting who you share stories with
Exploring the ability to share regular feed posts to your stories
Adapting your story post to a regular feed post
Sometimes you want to use content that someone else created or you want to repurpose your own content for your stories. In this chapter, we show you how to share, or repost, Instagram stories to your own, how to reuse existing content, and how to be selective in who you share your stories with.
Sharing Another Story to Your Own Story
You may come across a cool Instagram story that you want to share to your own stories. Unfortunately, you can’t directly share just any story to your own. There isn’t an existing tool within Instagram that allows this. There are, however, two workarounds:
If you’re tagged in someone’s story, you can share that story to your own. If a friend of yours posts a story and includes your username tag in the post, you receive a notification in your direct messages. Included with the notification that you were mentioned in their story is the Add to Your Story option (see Figure 9-1).
When you tap that option, you initiate a story post where their post appears in the screen. You can shrink or enlarge it, reposition it, and add your own content to it using stickers, doodles, and more.
You can take a screen shot of another person’s story, saving it as an image. It should be pretty obvious that this only works well with photos, not videos. When you have the screen shot of their story, you can upload that image as your own story.
Taking a screen shot and reposting it does put you in the area of copyright infringement, and you never want to use someone’s post without their permission. Always ask them first if you have their permission to repost it. You can send them a direct message or reply to their story to ask for that permission.
FIGURE 9-1: The option to share someone else’s story post to your own story.
Sharing Some Stories to Select People
For all the fun you can have creating Instagram stories, you may not want every post to be available to every one of your followers or to anyone publicly. Fortunately, Instagram has provided a few solutions to allow you to send stories privately or to select groups of people.
Sharing via a direct message
If you want to share a story post to one or a number of individuals via a direct message, you can easily do so. Create your story as you normally would, adding all your personalized components.
At the bottom of the screen, tap the Share button (the white button that contains a black arrow) instead of the Your Story button (see Figure 9-2). In the Share menu, tap Message. A new screen opens with a list of people you commonly send messages to.
If the person you want to send it to is listed there, simply tap the Send button next to their name and they’ll receive the story in their direct messages. You can repeat this process to send the same story to more than one person using this method.
If the person you want to send it to is not listed, use the Search bar to type in the person’s name and then select who to send the story to.
Sharing to your Close Friends list
You may have noticed that there is also an option to send stories to your Close Friends list. This feature is a messaging tool that allows you to select a number of the people you follow on Instagram and put them into a group called Close Friends.
To set up your list of close friends, go to your Instagram profile and tap the three-line button in the upper-right corner. The Menu page appears, where you can tap Close Friends to select and set up your list (see Figure 9-3).
FIGURE 9-2: The Share button is in the lower-right corner of the screen.
FIGURE 9-3: Navigate to the menu tab on your profile to access the Close Friends tab to set up a list of friends.
In the Close Friends screen, you see a list of recommended friends, based on those you most often interact with. You can add any of them by tapping the circle button next to their names (see Figure 9-4). If the person or people you want to add are not listed in the suggestions, you can use the search bar to type the name of the person you follow and add them to your list.
FIGURE 9-4: Tap the circle next to a person’s name to add a check mark and put the person on your Close Friends list.
You can add multiple people to this list, but you can only have one list. You may want to use this list for family, friends, or colleagues.
If you add someone by accident or you later want to remove someone from the list, navigate back to this Close Friends list and tap to remove the check mark next to the name of the person.
Once you have your Close Friends list set up, tap Done. Now you can share stories specifically with them!
When you’re in your story creation screen (see Figure 9-5), you can tap the Close Friends icon at the bottom of the screen to share it with the list, or you can tap the Share button and choose the Close Friends list from the next screen.
FIGURE 9-5: Easily share a story to your Close Friends list by tapping the Close Friends icon.
Sharing Instagram Posts and Reels to Your Stories
As creative and unique as Instagram stories are, you may want to share an Instagram post or a Reel to a story. A good educational piece, a post about news or something trendy, or even just good entertainment can be worthy of sharing with your followers.
Instagram has provided a simple sharing tool that you can use to share a post to your story. Under any feed post or in any Reel (your own or someone else’s) is a paper airplane icon (see Figure 9-6). This is the share icon.
FIGURE 9-6: Use the paper airplane icon to share a post on Instagram.
Tap the share icon to open a screen that allows you to choose how you want to share that post. To share it to your story, simply tap the Add Post to Your Story option, as shown on the left in Figure 9-7.
This will open your story creation screen with the image of that post or the first part of the video added to the story. If sharing a feed post image, when you tap the image of the original post, you can toggle between two display options, one with just the original image and the account’s username (as shown on the right in Figure 9-7), or a screenshot of the original post, including the first couple lines of the caption.
You can edit the story, moving the post image or adding text, doodles, and stickers. When the story is published, the post image is a hyperlink back to the original post so others can view it.
FIGURE 9-7: Sharing a post to your story creates a hyperlinked image back to the original post that your followers can tap on to view the original post.
If you don’t see the option to share to your story, that means the person who published the original story hasn’t allowed their followers to share it.
Some of your followers may only watch your stories and not regularly see your feed posts. If you have a great piece of content you uploaded to your Instagram account, but you want to make sure people who watch your stories see it too, you can share your own post to your story. Go to the post on your own profile that you want to share, and follow the instructions earlier to share the post to your story.
Changing Your Story into a Regular Instagram Post
In the reverse of sharing posts to stories, you might create an incredible Instagram story and want to share that to your regular feed. Yes, you can do that, too!
Open any story, current or archived, and tap the three-dot More button in the lower-right corner of the story post (see Figure 9-8). A screen appears with a variety of options, including Share as Post. Tap that option and the post opens in a regular Instagram feed upload screen.
FIGURE 9-8: Convert an Instagram story into a feed post on your profile by tapping the More button on any current or archived story post and choosing to share it as a post.
If your story post was a static image, it transfers to the feed post as an image. Any stickers, text, or doodles, remain on the image. If your story post was a video or included animated stickers like GIFs, the post will upload to your feed as a video, retaining those features.
Any interactive components like polls, sliders, and chat stickers don’t retain their functionality in the feed post. They simply appear as static stickers.
Because stories are uploaded at a 9:16 dimension, you have to edit the image orientation and sizing of the feed post to select the area of the story you want to showcase. You can’t display the full 9:16 original post. An Instagram feed post has a maximum ratio of 4:5.
After uploading the story post and arranging it for the right orientation, continue editing the post, adding a caption, and adding any other components as you would to upload any other Instagram post.