There is a pattern that looks like effort and produces nothing: someone posts stories every day, feels busy, and cannot work out why the account is not growing.
Who sees a story
Overwhelmingly, people who already follow you — and of those, the ones who interact with you most. Stories are shown to your existing circle in rough order of how close it thinks you are. There is very little discovery in them by design.
Feed posts and short video are the opposite: they are the surfaces the platform uses to show you to people who have never heard of you. If growth is the goal, that is where the work has to go.
What stories are genuinely good at
- Keeping the people you already have — familiarity, not reach
- Asking things: polls and questions get answers a feed post never would
- The unpolished middle — process, mistakes, the part that would not survive the grid
- Pointing at something that matters: a launch, a link, a post worth going back for
Stories can be published through the API, so a tool can schedule them like anything else. Worth remembering that the story stays available for a day: scheduling one for 3am puts it at the bottom of everyone’s tray by the time they wake up.
A proportion that works
If you have limited time, spend it on the thing that reaches strangers and let stories be the cheap, unedited layer on top. Doing it the other way round is how an account stays busy and flat for a year.