To ask how you preview Instagram stories?

[Harara]

Help me out with this MN. Some of my insta stories get much more views than others, and it feels like this must be because followers are previewing the stories before actually opening them to decide whether they think they look interesting or not (there isn’t any other obvious pattern like stories posted at a particular time of day getting more views etc).

I’ve tried googling to see how you preview stories as I’d like to be able to do this myself. But the instructions I’ve come across claim if you swipe lightly left on the icon with the story, that will let you preview it. This definitely isn’t working for me. AIBU to think everyone is previewing Instagram stories except me? How do you do this?

Instagram is notorious for showing mostly ads and ‘promoted’ posts. I hardly ever see my friends posts and stories. And vice Versa.

You can’t really ‘preview” a story. You either click on it or you don’t. You can side swipe, from the Instagram home page, click on the persons story to the right of the persons you want to “preview” and slow slide across to the right, if that makes sense.

But I digress, social media views aren’t the be all
and end all of life. Unless you have a business, otherwise I’d suggest paying for promoted posts.

I've never been able to preview a story fully, but if you're watching stories normally (so just going through all of the ones on your insta) and you're swiping right to go to the next one, you can sort of half swipe across the screen and you'll be able to partly see the next one. You can't preview an individual story on someone's account as far as I know, that just shows it to you fully.

If you're a business / influencer page, people likely won't just be previewing your story before watching it, because the natural flow is to just swipe through stories and swipe off when done. It's possibly Instagram either showing your stories to followers or not, I know a lot of accounts are having trouble with Instagram not putting their content to the front of uploads.

Weird, I see all my friends’ stories at the top of my page. I don’t have a business, it’s just a personal account, and I know number of views isn’t a big deal, we’re talking tiny numbers here anyway. I’m really just curious whether there’s a common way of using Instagram that I don’t know how to do. I’ve got a couple of friends who post relentlessly about political issues and I don’t want to see those stories, just the personal ones, so if there was an easy way to preview without opening that would be helpful.

(this was in reply to @FlissyPaps)

Ah this is interesting and helpful, thank you. I don’t go through all my stories as there are usually just a few that I want to see so I click on them directly. Sounds like perhaps that’s different to how most people are doing it.

It's possibly Instagram either showing your stories to followers or not, I know a lot of accounts are having trouble with Instagram not putting their content to the front of uploads.

Maybe that is it yes! Basically I’ve noticed that stories with pictures of people in them seem to get a lot more views than landscapes etc, and they get views from a wider range of followers. So maybe it’s Instagram that considers those stories more interesting and is showing them more prominently to more people. I hadn’t thought of that!

@Harara

This is what it looks like when you swipe right and holding the screen (fairly slowly!) when viewing stories from the homepage if that makes sense 😊 then you can swipe back / forward / off the stories.