Reflection on Multimodality in Instagram Stories
The field of multimodal storytelling is expanding as new technologies, like Instagram Stories, become mainstream. Through the combined use of text, video, image, movement and more stories can be expressed in an infinite number of ways to increase audience engagement.
Multimodality is an old linguistics concept. It’s the approach to understanding communication through the many modes that one message is delivered. For example, if you are having a face to face conversation with someone, you can interpret their message through the meaning of their words, but also through their vocal emphasis, expression and body language.
According to the UCL Institute of Education:
Multimodality is an interdisciplinary approach that understands communication and representation to be more than about language.
In the 21st century digital world multimodal takes on a new role as social media users can construct new meaning using many media forms in one digital message. One popular and varied tool for this new kind of storytelling is the Instagram Story feature. This allows Instagram users to easily construct mobile friendly “stories” editing together images, text, video, and more which last on the user’s profile for 24 hours (or be permanently saved to highlights). The story feature was launched in 2016 and is now used by hundreds of millions of users every day.
The Power of Multimodality in Storytelling
When trying to share information, whether it’s for social, entertainment, or informative reasons, it’s human nature to organize it in the form of stories. Research shows that we enjoy and understand understand narratives better then facts and figures. You can probably relate is you’ve ever had to quickly gather information. Looking through a table of the facts may allow you more direct access to the information, but reading conclusions or looking at visual representations is much easier to understand (and much more interesting).
This is where multimodal comes it. Using multiple mediums to express information can aid in forming data into a narrative and keep users engaged. Data can be expressed in percentages while images and videos showing the subject or effect. Meanwhile comment can be add with text. Mood can be expressed with color or music. When done well, digital multimedia texts come together to express an exact feeling and meaning in a quick and simple way.
Instagram stories are particularly helpful in forming information into narratives because they are generally create over multiple short clips, allowing users to literally create a beginning, middle, and end.
Experience with Instagram Stories
As engaging as Instagram stories can be, they can also be really difficult and time consuming to construct, especially if you’re new at it. With so many options and uses everyone has their own style. As you can probably tell from the story above, I tend to prefer simple, graphic designs with short text, stickers, strong colors and just a little bit of movement.
There are other accounts that I like (and are otherwise popular) that have very different strategies. For example the New York Times posts regular news updates on their stories. They put the headline and tagline on the top and main image below, very similar to a traditional newspaper. In contrast the WWF make regular use of videos to take people out in the field. They usually include short clips of experts in the field explaining their work with stationary text of the main points, occasionally interspersed with relevant images of animals or landscapes.
In my experience there are a few key things to keep in mind in order to make a successful Instagram story. The first is to keep things simple. There are so many options on Instagram (or if you’re using another tool like Canva) that it’s easy to get over excited and jam everything into one story. I have yet to see a story that looks nice that uses more then 2–4 mediums at once. For example, a story with a video might have some text and maybe a sticker but usually nothing else. You have to remember that users aren’t given very long to view a story and it’s usually coming up on a small screen.
Secondly, you need to keep an eye on the text-to-image ratio. Again, people only have a short time to look each story, so big chunks of text can be offputting. Also Instagram is still a image focused medium, so lots of only text stories can cause watchers to be disengaged. There are accounts that use text only stories, but they generally keep the text short (and large) and sandwich them in a sequence between photo stories.
Thirdly, you need to find an effective length and frequency for story posting. Most of the time, Instagram stories are posted in short sequences that create a narrative together. Over 70% will watch sequences of up to seven all the way through. It goes up to over 80% if you post 1–3 stories. Therefore I’d generally recommend stick to sequences of between 1–7 stories, depending on how much length you absolutely need to tell your narrative. Because stories disappear after 24 hours, it’s generally recommended that you try to post something every day in order to remain visible on other users’ story bar.
Finally, it can be fun and useful to engage with users. Social media is built for engagement and Instagrm is no exception. This can mean something as simple as asking them to keep watching, to pointing them to another story, to conducting polls.
In conclusion Instagram stories are a fun and effective way to use multimodality to engage with people. The amount of options may seem overwhelming, but if you practice and follow a few simple rules, you should be able to find your own style and improve your digital storytelling.
