Best Instagram Story Ideas

1. Rainbow Color Text

Texts are definitely the most important part of your story. They help you convey the message in a more obvious manner. Putting plain white texts in your stories makes it boring. You would be aware of the color tabs available on Instagram as well the color palette. Just in case you weren’t, you can access the full-color palette by long pressing any color icon. Using the color picker tool you can choose any color from the palette for the text.

Just to take the color game a notch up, you can also give your texts a rainbow look or the ombre effect. Type your text in the story and select the entire part. Now, drag your finger along the gradient from left to right, while dragging your other finger left to right across the text at the same time. This will give you a rainbow effect.

This can be undone when you select any other color for the text. In iOS, you need to be careful as the effect is undone as soon as you bring up the keyboard.

2. Attach your selfie

You can also attach your selfie on top of the original picture to give it a comic feel. After you load your story, swipe up to access the stickers. Click on the camera icon visible from the menu. This will open the front camera for you and you can attach a small picture of yours to the original post.

You can use the same trick to post your photo onto some texture or wall. This can like a chat bubble or billboard message.

There are tons of creative ways to use this trick for your stories.  

3. Pin texts

You would have uploaded tons of videos on Instagram but surely wouldn’t have noticed the pin option. You can actually pin stickers, profile links or hashtags to an object. Long press the text you want to pin until you see this screen. This will open a slider. Slowly scrub through the slider to the point where your object appears in the video. Place the text on the object and click pin. Instagram will automatically track the object movement and pin the text to the object. This takes your storytelling skills and creativity to another level.

You can also use this to introduce take-overs in your stories.

4. Custom apps for Stories

Instagram has recently introduced tons of options when it comes to stories. But there are times when you feel you need to move beyond those options. This is the time you should start using 3rd party applications. The application that I would recommend for stories is Unfold. It’s free and available both for iOS and Android.

They have a set of pre-designed templates which you can use to add photos and text to before uploading them to their Story. Attach your photographs to them and it gives a distinct feel to the stories. Have a look for yourself. If you don’t like the free templates, there a bunch of templates which you can buy at a one-time nominal fee of 2$. Sadly, Unfold doesn’t support videos. Instagram only offers 5 text styles: Strong, Classic, Modern, Neon and Typewriter. If you want more text styles beyond these 5, you can try the CoolFancy Text Generator.

Visit, the webpage and type the text you want, it will generate tons of text styles for the text sample. You just have to copy the text and paste it onto your stories. This adds a cool touch to your stories.

5. Post Teaser

If you are a social media influencer and you want to build hype for your upcoming project or posts, there is a neat little Instagram Story hack to do that. Load your story and then click on the paintbrush icon. Select the transparent brush then tap and hold anywhere on the screen. It will fill the entire screen with a white transparent color. You can also choose the color for the transparent layer from the color picker tool. Read: Best Instagram Grid Apps to Level up Your Instagram Game

This can also act as a teaser or preview for your posts. You can add your titles on it and then release the post in the next story.

6. Use handwritten texts!

I cannot stress enough on the importance of texts and what gives them a personal touch is handwritten texts. Go to the paintbrush menu and select the solid paint brush. Use your stylus or hand to write onto the picture.

This gives a personal touch to the stories which cannot be easily replicated by someone else.

7. 3D Text effect

This trick requires you to take little extra effort. Once you have typed the text, select the entire text. Copy and paste it on the screen. Change the color of the duplicate text to black. Carefully place the original text on top of this black duplicate layer. This gives the text a fake 3D effect. You can also call it drop shadow effect.

8. Use Hashtags!

Hashtags help your stories get noticed to a larger audience. Suppose, if you use #summer then your posts will be featured in the hashtag search page of Instagram. Although, there are times when the hashtags don’t go well with the picture. You can smartly hide it by changing the color of the hashtag to same as the background color. This is how you do it.

Which is your favorite?

Instagram keeps on making additions to the stories so it’s difficult to keep track of everything. These tricks will definitely give a new touch to your Instagram profile. Let me know in the comments which one is your favorite? Also Read: 9 Best Video Editing Apps for Instagram