Earlier this month, Instagram announced a couple of new tools to enhance to their popular Stories feature, Archive and Highlights. Stories will now be automatically saved to users’ private Archives after they expire. Highlights enables users to group Stories together, by theme, topic, area of their life, or any other way they like.

These updates provide a ton of value to brands on Instagram, allowing them to extend campaigns and promotions, create separate Highlights channels for product lines or collections, and optimize around high-performing Stories content that can now be saved. This will be especially useful for fashion and beauty brands to introduce seasonal arrivals and new promotions.

In the past, when Stories expired after 24 hours, they were great for brands looking to create ephemeral, or in-the-moment, clips to share with their followers. However, it was difficult for brands to rationalize large production costs to develop Stories. Now that they can save this content and re-purpose it in their multi-channel marketing, there is more reason to invest in creating Stories.

‍Pixlee’s Direct Uploaders Make It Easy for Brands to Collect Stories The other key thing to note, and this brings me to why we’re super excited here at Pixlee, is that previously brands were unable to leverage user-generated Stories in marketing content. Using Pixlee, brands will be able to collect Stories from their fans and influencers, and make them shoppable on their ecommerce channels, in email, and anywhere they use UGC.

Pixlee even makes it simple for users to submit their Stories to brands using one of our Direct Uploaders which can be added to any Pixlee widget or used as a standalone button. Direct Uploaders are mobile optimized and allow customers to submit user-generated content from their desktop, mobile device, or social media accounts.

Direct Uploaders can be added to any Pixlee website widget, any Pixlee widget in a native mobile app, to other custom locations – enabling customers to easily submit Instagram Stories anywhere, anytime.

Using this more personal way to collect this content from their most passionate customers, brands can quickly capitalize on the creation of Stories for contests, product launches, customer reviews, and more.

Our fully customizable Direct Uploaders also help brands on the backend, enabling them to collect customer data, include Terms of Service or Terms of Use to ensure content rights, and add a link to a custom thank you image or link to a landing page to be shown when the user completes an uploader flow.

With Stories becoming even more engaging for its 300 million users, talk to your Pixlee Customer Service team member today about using any of our Direct Uploaders to help gather this authentic brand content and make it shoppable. And, if you’re not a Pixlee customer, contact us today to schedule a demo.