How Businesses are Using the Mention Sticker on Instagram to Drive Brand Awareness

The mention sticker in Instagram Stories is a great marketing tool for businesses. Here’s how businesses are using it to increase brand awareness and drive sales.

Collaboration is the key to a successful business. From building lasting relationships with business partners to working with influencers, collaborating with others is part of every business. However, collaboration is not just something you do because it is nice or necessary. Collaboration will make your business more successful.

The power of collaboration

There is a lot of truth to the idea of “better together”. The most successful brands out there know it, and use collaborations to their advantage. When Nike decided to partner up with Michael Jordan back in the 1980s, it took their company from being just one of many sneaker brands to becoming iconic, and it changed sports marketing forever.

When Coachella put a hologram of the legendary rapper Tupac on stage for a concert in 2012, the slightly dated festival suddenly became the coolest music event for years to come.

That’s where the power of collaborations lies: in the freshness a new partner will give your brand. What’s more, collaborations also amplify your reach and drive brand awareness because collaborations open your brand up to a new audience and let you tap into a new market.

While big companies have the budget to spread the word about their collaborations, as a small business you might not have the same resources. So how do you let your customers know that you are collaborating with somebody? By using the mention sticker in your Instagram story!

Why you should use the mention sticker in your Instagram story

Before Instagram introduced the interactive mention sticker to its Stories in 2020, you were already able to tag other accounts through the text field in your story. So what is the benefit of using the sticker instead?

First off, the mention sticker stands out more because it is bigger, and you can also choose between different colors. Second, it just looks more stylish. So if you want to feature a new collaboration in your story more prominently, simply insert the mention sticker, and your followers will see it right away.

Aside from elevating the design in their stories, businesses are also using the mention sticker to expand their reach and grow their brand. Here’s how!

Announce new collaborations

As collaborations can help your brand in so many ways, it is important to make sure your fans are aware of them. The mention sticker on Instagram Stories is perfect for that.

Especially, if the collaboration is linked to a new service or product, you can use it to talk about a new launch, as the makeup brand Sephora is doing in this story to announce that they will start selling their products at JCPenney stores.

Since the tagged partners will also most likely share your post — it is a collaboration after all — it gives your brand more exposure and creates extra buzz around a new launch.

Build business relationships

The mention sticker is also an easy way to tag another business. Why not use it to give a shout out to fellow businesses in your area? You could pick a different business every week to show your support and strengthen the local economy. It’s also a great opportunity for you to connect to these businesses and either strengthen your existing relationships with them or build new ones.

The Treehouse Café from Australia, for example, buys their coffee from a company called Inglewood Coffee Roasters. By mentioning Inglewood Coffee in their story, they are not only supporting their business partner, but also promoting the coffee they serve in their café.

Instagram has been pushing this type of mentions even further by introducing the “Support small businesses” sticker this year that is made especially for tagging other businesses.

Sharing user generated content

The great thing about the mention sticker on Instagram Stories is: it works both ways. Meaning, you can not only tag other people, but other users can tag you as well. In an editorial campaign, the fashion magazine Cosmopolitan asked its followers how they celebrated Pride in 2020, and shared their answers and tagged their accounts.

This is a clever way to interact with your fans and increase your brand awareness at the same time. It can strengthen the connection between your company and your community, encourage sharing, and get your company’s name out there with minimal effort and potentially big rewards. These mentions of your brand will also show up in your DMs, which makes it easy for you to both see when your brand has been mentioned and share those posts.

Sharing user generated content creates a direct relationship with your followers and shows them that you care about their views.

Grow your following

There is an unspoken social media rule that if a user mentions or tags you in a post, you re-post it as a way of saying “thank you.” If you post user generated content and tag your followers or give a shout out to your collaborators through mention stickers, chances are they will feel compelled to share the love.

You can also add a slight twist to re-posting content like Reese Blutstein, an Atlanta based lifestyle influencer, is doing in her story. As she is recommending a dish to her followers, she also tags the food blogger Jane Dean Morgan, who inspired the recipe.

It’s not a guarantee that users will re-post your mentions, and it is also not a feature you should overuse because it can be annoying if you are constantly trying to get your stories re-posted, but if done thoughtfully, using the mention sticker can help you grow your following.

Support an important cause

A mention sticker in your story makes it very easy for your followers to connect directly with the tagged account. Apart from business collaborations, you can also use this feature to support a person or a cause that is important to you.

Reese Witherspoon, for instance, uses several mention stickers in a story to show the organizations and people she supports in their fight against racism.

Use Storrito to plan your Instagram stories

Now that you know how your business can benefit from using the mention sticker, how do you actually go about including it in your stories?

You could of course post every story from your smartphone directly on the Instagram app, and include the mention sticker as you post it. However, Instagram won’t allow you to schedule stories or work on a post with other users, which is not very helpful for a business where it makes more sense to plan ahead, and schedule your posts.

A better option would therefore be to have a tool that allows you to take the time to really think about your marketing strategy and visualize it, carefully plan the best time to post your stories, figure out when and how to best include the mention stickers – and do all of this from the comfort of your desktop, and even together with your team.

That’s what you can do with Storrito. The planning tool lets you upload, edit and schedule Instagram stories on your desktop. And because Storrito is a collaborative tool you can also work on each story with other people. Find out how easy it is to connect your Instagram account to Storrito and get started right away.