#polishedinsta

[polishedinsta]

Welcome to Polished Insta

Polished Insta is a website geared towards helping users boost their Instagram engagement, improve their feeds and get more followers. On polishedinsta.com, I discuss products that can enhance posts, Instagram’s features and how to create a polished, branded profile.

[polishedinsta]

What Not To Do On Insta Stories

Stories on Instagram are a super fun way to engage with your followers. I personally love posting about my day; every day. I use polls to ask my followers what I should eat for lunch, post videos of the person in front of me who’s walking WAY too slow, take photos of my friends passed out while studying and post the ever-enchanting sunset shots. 

Posting is 50% of the fun. Watching is the other half...the half that irritates me the most. Don’t get me wrong, I love keeping up with the people I follow, but I really hate when people use the Story feature ALL wrong. There are a LOT of things that bother me. Below are my top three:

1. When people post fast/seizure-inducing Boomerangs

The Boomerang feature creates short video loops that play forward and backward; almost like a gif. Naturally, the feature speeds up what you’re capturing and many people can’t seem to comprehend this. For example, some girls like to show off their nail polish after a fresh manicure. Instead of slowly waving their fingers during a boomerang like this:

they end up capturing something that looks more like this (except 10x worse):

This obviously defeats the purpose of showing of your fresh nails because no one can see what’s happening and it’s incredibly disorienting.

2. When people post outside of the visible fields

Instagram is an amazing app that gives people many features that go unnoticed. When viewing someone’s Instagram story, the top left of the screen shows the user’s icon and handle, and the bottom has a space to send messages to that user. Instagram offers ghosted guidelines as your crafting your story that help you avoid these areas to ensure readable. Examples are below: 

3. When people don’t realize Instagram blocks uncopyrighted music 

Once upon a time, you were able to have a song playing on your phone and record a video for your Instagram story at the same time; making that music audible in your post. However, a few months ago, Instagram added a music feature to stop users from posting songs that didn’t belong to them. A Debbie Downer move for sure, but their music feature gives you a limited amount of songs you can use for your posts that cites the artist. If this feature isn’t used, the background song is only heard for 2 loud seconds, followed by an annoying muffled version of that song for the remainder of your post. Just use the music feature. Just use it.