Chapter 15

Sneaky Story Sharing

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 repost Instagram stories, 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’ll receive a notification in your direct messages. Included with the notification that you were mentioned in their story will be an option to Add This to Your Story (see Figure 15-1).

  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 their 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 15-1: When tagged in someone else’s story, you’ll receive a notification in your direct message, and you have the option to share that 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 Send To button instead of the Your Story button. A new screen opens with a list of people you commonly send messages to (see Figure 15-2).

FIGURE 15-2: Tap the Send To button on a story to send it to only a select group.

If the person you want to send it to is listed there, simply tap the Send button next to her name and she’ll receive the story in her 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 his name and select him to send the story to him.

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 15-3).

FIGURE 15-3: 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’ll see a list of recommended friends, based on those you most normally interact with. You can add any of them by tapping the Add button next to their names. 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 him to your 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, tap the tab for Your List and tap the Remove button next to his name (see Figure 15-4).

FIGURE 15-4: Remove anyone from your Close Friends list by navigating to Your List and tapping Remove next to the person you want you delete from the list.

Now that you have your Close Friends list set up, you can share stories specifically with them!

When you’re in your story creation screen (see Figure 15-5), you can tap the Close Friends icon at the bottom of the screen to share it with the list, or you can tap the Send To button and choose the Close Friends list from the next screen.

FIGURE 15-5: Easily share a story to your Close Friends list by tapping the Close Friends icon or the Send To button when creating a story.

Sharing Regular Instagram Posts to Your Stories

As creative and unique as Instagram stories are, you may want to share regular Instagram posts 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 feed post to your Story. Under any post (your own or someone else’s), you’ll see a paper airplane icon (see Figure 15-6). This is the share icon.

FIGURE 15-6: The paper airplane icon is the share button 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.

This will open your story creation screen with the image of that post added to the story. If you tap the image of the original post, you can toggle between two display options, one (shown in Figure 15-7) with just the original image and the account’s username, or a screenshot of the original post, including the first couple of 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 15-7: 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.

This share to Story feature is widely available, but not everyone has access to it. You should have the share icon but you may only see the options to share to individuals, not to add it to your story.

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. And, yes, you can do that, too!

Open any story, current or archived, and tap on the three-dots More button in the lower-left corner of the Story post. A screen appears with a variety of options, including Share as Post. Tap that option and the post will open in a regular Instagram feed upload screen (see Figure 15-8).

FIGURE 15-8: 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 will transfer to the feed post as an image. Any stickers, text, or doodles, will 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 will not retain their functionality in the feed post. They’ll simply appear as static stickers.

Because stories are uploaded at a 9:16 dimension, you’ll have to edit the image orientation and sizing of the feed post to select the area of the story you want to showcase. You won’t be able to 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.