How to do Swipe Up on Instagram | Instagram Academy

Welcome to this lesson of our Instagram Academy, where we will talk about Instagram Swipe Up: what it is and how to use it.

As the Academy’s lessons go on we cover more and more tools and activities that become useful once you start building a real following on this network and decide to use every feature available.

When we talk about Instagram Swipe Up we are essentially talking about a link in Instagram stories that lets us send our followers to a specific page — a landing page, a product page, an article or the home page of a site, a blog or an online store.

Let’s not waste any more time and get into the lesson.

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Instagram Stories links

The social network of celebrities and new influencers is without doubt Instagram. Photos and videos are the means used to build visibility, but Instagram does not stop at posts, links and reposts.

The network keeps building features that bring influencers and followers closer together. How? One of the tools many people use is the Swipe Up function.

It lets you put a link inside an Instagram story.

If you are trying it on your own profile and can’t work out how to do Swipe Up on Instagram, you may not meet all the requirements.

So let’s take it a step at a time.

Some of the excellent features Instagram offers are not open to everyone, only to users who meet certain conditions:

a minimum follower count for public profiles: at least 10,000
a business profile and a Facebook page linked to the Instagram profile (find out how to connect Instagram to Facebook)

Why the discrimination?

It is nothing new for platforms this size to offer features only to people who can draw a professional benefit from them. Consider us lucky: the threshold was originally set at a million followers and only later lowered.

That number is not new on Instagram — remind you of anything? Exactly: 10,000 followers is also the minimum for requesting the blue tick next to your name.

Steps for adding Swipe Up, from hubspot.com

Instagram story links: how to add one

If you are among those who can actually use this feature, here is how.

To add a link to Instagram stories, follow these steps:

open your Instagram app
go to the stories section (or swipe left to right once you are in the app) and start one
shoot a video or take a photo
when you are ready to add a link, tap the chain-shaped icon
in the interface that appears, enter the link to the page you want to connect
check it with the “link preview” option
publish the story

How does a story with a link look?

If you have added the Swipe Up, at the bottom of your video or image there will be an arrow with a small animation inviting exactly that movement — the touch swipe, dragging your finger upwards.

Within moments the linked page is visible and browsable, still inside the Instagram app.

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Instagram Swipe Up: the advantages for users

To decide whether a feature is good or bad we can weigh the pros and cons. Broadly there are no cons, since nobody is forced to use Swipe Up.

So let’s look at the advantages of having Swipe Up and of knowing how to do Swipe Up on Instagram.

Instagram Swipe Ups are this network’s version of the CTA (call to action). They pull the viewer in by inviting an action, so they tend to spark curiosity. Instagram also offers accompanying GIFs that highlight the presence of the Swipe Up and make it even more obvious.

So what are the advantages?

They are a further step in engaging the viewer. Whoever uses one can send a follower to a deeper page or a sales page.
You can track and monitor how the landing page performs: how many Swipe Ups there were, or what engagement this Instagram story link generated.

Having access to links in Instagram stories lays the ground for successful sponsorships with brands. If you can put a link in your Instagram stories, brands look on you favourably, because when you shoot a video or a photo using a particular service or product you can add a link straight to buying it.

To everyone reading this lesson who has not yet reached those numbers, there is an alternative way to add a link to a site.

You don’t need Swipe Up: you can put a link in your bio. That is the one section where a link is clickable. What you can do is keep changing the link in the bio and tell your followers, in the post caption, that they should tap the link in bio to reach the page in question.

Free to use image from Google Images

Conclusion

Let’s run through the essentials of this lesson.

Instagram gives certain profiles extra features beyond the basic ones. In this lesson we saw how to do Swipe Up on Instagram, in other words how to add links to Instagram stories.

We also saw that this feature is not open to everyone, only to profiles with at least 10,000 followers that also have a business profile.

So the first step is a good follower count, high enough to be considered worthy of the feature. Still to take that first step? Read the Instagram Academy lessons, you will find plenty worth knowing.

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