Instagram Stories turns too. Here are some tips and tricks to take your story posts to the next level. What's going on. I'm rich Demiro. This is rich on Tech. If you can believe it. Instagram Stories has been around now for two years. The service celebrated its second birthday on August second. How appropriate. What started out is a Snapchat copycat has turned into the way to share quick little posts online. I love it. A lot of folks love using this, and it's because it's a lot of fun.
Instagram says there are more than four hundred million people using the feature every day. To me, the popularity is threefold. First Off, when it came out, everyone was already on Instagram, so it was super easy to start using it compared to signing up with a new account on Snapchat. And even if you didn't post, you can still check and see what your friends were posting. Then of course you eventually would use it. Second, Instagram lets you get super
creative with your posts. There are so many ways to craft your posts. You can include text, videos, jiffs, music, whatever you want. And Third, Instagram keeps adding new tools that you can continue to have fun with. They just added that new music feature the questions feature, or of course, the poll feature. Now, there is one new feature that not everyone will appreciate, and this is just in the
Instagram app at large. It's called Activity Status. This basically tells your friends when you are actively using the app, or they can see the last time that you check the app. Now, some people might like this, others might not. The idea is that if you know when your friends are online, you'll interact with them in more ways, like sending a message or a direct photo. But if you don't want to do this, let me tell you how
to turn it off. On iOS. You open Instagram, you go to your profile page by tapping the little person icon in the lower right hand corner of your screen. Then, once you're on your profile page, tap the gear icon which is near the upper right of the screen. Next year edit profile button. This will take you to the options page. Scroll down to the section labeled Privacy and Security and tap wort says activity status. You can toggle the switch next to show activity status to turn it
on or off. Now, if you're on Android, the instructions are slightly different. You open Instagram, then you go to your profile page by tapping the little person icon in the upper right hand corner of your screen. Once you're on your profile page, tap the three little dots in the upper right hand corner of your screen to take you to the settings page. Scroll down to the section labeled Privacy and Security. Then tap where it says activity Status.
Toggle the switch next to show activity status. Now. When this is lit up, that means it's on and it will show all of your friends and anyone that you message when you're online and the last time that you check the app. You'll also see this information if your friends have this feature turned on. Now, if you do turn activity status off, your activity details will not be shared with your friends, but you also won't be able to see their activity detail status. Get it, It's a
two way street. Instagram wants to make sure that you have the feature turn on so that you can access the data from your friends, so keep that in mind if you turn it off. Okay, now time for some tips and tricks to take your Instagram stories to the next level. First off, if you're posting a picture over twenty four hours old, you'll notice that Instagram automatically includes a date on the screen that you took the picture.
If you don't want that. All you have to do is tap and drag it into the little trash can that appears at the bottom of your screen. If you're recording a video and you want to zoom in, well, all you have to do is press and hold that little recorder, then slide your finger up or down the screen. Yep,
zooms in or out. If you're using the hands free recording option, which I often do, all you have to do is pinch on the screen to zoom in or out, just like you would if you're looking at a photo on iPhone or Android, to zoom in or out for a closer look. Now here's a fun tip. I call it the eraser effect. First, take a picture, then tap the penn icon. Now, normally you would doodle or write something on the screen, but instead of doing that, choose a color first and then tap and hold the screen.
You'll notice the entire screen will fill up with that color. But here's the fun part. Now, tap the eraser at the top of the screen and you can create a cool see through effect. Wherever you erase on your screen, Basically where you're erasing the color, you'll start to see your photo right through it. So think scratch off lottery ticket. That's a really fun on. This next tip is similar, but instead of filling your screen with a solid color, you can fill it with a see through color. First,
take a photo, then tap the highlighter tool. Now choose a color, then tap and hold like you did before, and the color will fill the screen, but this time it'll be a sea through color. You'll still be able to see your photo behind the color. Now, when it comes to those stickers, you can have a lot of fun with those. But what you might not know is
that you're not necessarily limited to just one design. So after you drag a sticker onto your story, tap it and most of the time you're going to see it appear in a bunch of different styles, so you can just cycle through those and stop it the one you want. And finally, if you ever wondered how your friends get a sticker to sort of stick to an object on screen, you know, follow the action, Well, it's called pinning. You have to pin it. So first capture some movement, then
choose a sticker. Now tap and hold the sticker to bring up a special menu that lets you pin it. You'll see a slider you slide to see the object that you want to pin your sticker to just place it on top of that object, So drag it and kind of leave it there. Then you can adjust the size. Finally, tap where it says pin. Now, when your story video starts moving again, you'll notice that the sticker will follow the action. How cool is that. There you have it.
Now that you've got some new tricks to try out, I want to see them in action, tag me in your next creative Instagram story and I will share some of your posts on my stories to my followers. Just find me on Instagram. I am at rich on Tech. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to see a video of these tips, just go to my website. It is Richontech dot tv. I'm Richdemiro. I'll talk to you real soon.