19 Instagram Story Ideas To Beat the Competition in 2025

Instagram stories have become an integral part of its user experience and there’s no doubt that it enriches the experience. But did you know that IG stories can be used to meet personal and professional goals as well? Sounds fascinating right? Uploading the right story with inspiration from some cool Instagram story ideas can easily help you elevate your Instagram game and create more appealing and traffic-driving stories. How exactly?

In this blog, we’ll cover the best Instagram story ideas for 2025 that you can use to create some highly engaging and rewarding IG stories. We’ll be covering some of the most trending Instagram story templates and features to get you started. So without any further delay, let’s dive right into it!

Step into 2025 with these Instagram Story Ideas

Creating an engaging and fun Instagram story can be difficult and well, it definitely takes a lot of time to perfectly curate a story that your audience would love. With the arrival of 2025, we were introduced to many new filters and story features by Instagram that you can use in your stories. 

We have identified all these latest features and templates and have curated 19 Story Ideas for individuals, professionals, and businesses to make your stories more aesthetically pleasing.

Instagram Story Ideas for Business

Instagram stories are not just a feature but a tool if you know how to make the best out of them.  Using Instagram can be a great way to take your business online and expand exponentially in the process. The following ideas will teach you exactly how you can make the most out of your IG stories and use them for your business.

1. Daily Newsletters and Updates

Posting daily newsletters and updates about your products and reviews on your stories can be a great way to engage your customers and attract new ones. All you’ll need to do is, get your hands on the best testimonials on your products and services, get a designer to create a post out of it, and post it on your IG story.

2. Themed stories

There’s no doubt that the festive seasons are the best time for business and making revenue. If you’re a business owner and a festival is coming your way, then you should know that it’s time to get creative. You can create a festive-themed story post with some offers or discounts attached to it for some increased sales.

3. Giveaways 

This one’s a classic! If you’re a business owner, then hosting small giveaways is one of the best things that you can do for yourselves. You can post a giveaway story on your profile with an engaging Instagram call to action like “repost this story and stand a chance to win (product name)”. This way, you can market yourself for a very negligible cost.

4. Polls for Direct Engagement

Another story idea that has been proven to be highly beneficial for businesses is to post comparison polls on their stories. You can use a 50-50 template to compare two of your best products and create a poll with a prompt like “Which one do you use” or “Who do you think wins?”. Such stories are fun and can engage your users to check out the products as well.

5. Share coupons and deals

Posting exclusive coupons and deals for your Instagram audience can be a great way to drive more followers towards your profile. Moreover, you can also make it fun and engaging for your audience by creating some riddles to crack the exclusive coupon codes to avail discounts and freebies.

6. Showcase your new and best products

Do you have a new product coming up? Or do you have a product that’s absolutely loved by your customers? If yes, then why not use this opportunity to get some business out of it? 

You can launch small teaser clips or customer appreciation videos for your products and services to showcase your new products and their popularity amongst your audience to drive new potential customers to your profile.

7. Hiring alerts and updates

Instagram stories can be a great way to create some hiring alerts and job posts to hire new employees for your business. You can create a design yourself or ask a designer to make a hiring alert story for you to post on your story to find some potential candidates.

8. Link to your websit

This is undoubtedly the best feature for any business on Instagram. The Link sticker or slide-up feature is a relatively new function of Instagram with tons of use cases. You can choose the link sticker to attach a custom link to your story that can be used to redirect your audience to your store or products gallery.

Moreover, you can also use this sticker to redirect your audience to your review page to get some positive reviews on your products.

Instagram is a great marketing tool and many businesses have started to understand its potential. The platform has many features but Instagram stories are undoubtedly the best feature that can help you take your marketing game to the next level. So make sure you use these business Instagram story ideas for your IG profile.

Creators and Influencers

No one can use the potential of Instagram stories like a creator or influencer can. Creators and Influencers have an audience to entertain and maintain which allows almost no room for any mistakes.

Instagram stories play a very vital role in their careers but it can be very hectic to find new ideas to make your stories more fun and engaging. But fret not because we have listed some of the most creative story ideas for Creators and Influencers to spice up their stories for more engagement and views.

9. Use Infographics

Using infographics in a fun and creative way to address any topics or your content is a very unique but engaging way to get the attention of your story viewers. There are many external tools that you can use to create some really cool infographics and step up your stories like never before.

10. Layer Images and Posts

Have you posted a new reel or post? Why not drive more traffic on it with IG stories? To do that, you can share the post on your story and use the ‘new post’ or ‘new reel’ sticker to cover up the post. This will compel your story viewers to click on your post/reel which in turn will increase your overall views and engagement.

11. Create aesthetic templates

Instagram has many default templates for you to use however, there are many filters in Instagram that can create some really cool templates for you to post your images on. Here are some of those filters:

• Manga bubble
• Platan
• Pingos de chuva

12. Behind the scenes

Shooting a new reel? Why not share some behind-the-scenes and bloopers with your audience? We all can agree that bloopers are fun to watch and as a creator or influencer, you can get tons of views on your stories by posting some fun and exclusive elements from your life on your stories.

13.  Add Yours Instagram Sticker

How could we forget this? The newly launched Add Yours Instagram sticker could be seen on almost every other story during Christmas and New Year. The feature was posted by almost every influencer, public figure, and creator because of the potential this sticker holds. 

To use this sticker, you just have to click on the stickers option in your stories and search for ‘add yours’. Once you’ve found the sticker, you can add any prompts of your choice and post your story.

14. Embrace the beauty of simplicity

Sometimes, just an aesthetic image is all you need to get your audience hooked with your stories. Just click a picture of the coffee you’ve ordered, put an aesthetic filter on it, choose soothing music, and post it on your story. You can also share any little activities from your daily life with a filter and soft music to keep your audience updated with your routine.

Creators and Influencers have loads of options for their stories that they can post to get more reach and followers on their profiles. With these Instagram story ideas, you can expect exponential growth in your profile’s reach and followers.

Cute Instagram Story Ideas for an Aesthetic Profile

So you want to post some cute stories but don’t have any ideas for the same? Well, guess what? We’ve collected some cute Instagram story ideas to give your profile a makeover and an aesthetic touch. We hope you’ll use them wisely or you might get flooded with notifications of new likes and followers. Let’s cover them real quick!

15. Use text over subjects

Have you ever seen those stories in which the text is used as a boundary for a subject in a very cute and pleasing way? Well, we’ve attached a reference for you down below. The best part is that anyone can create these stories that too with minimum effort. 

You just need to select any filters of your choice (black and white works the best) type whatever you want to and align the text beside your subject to create this cute effect.

16. Use heart-shaped frames

Instagram provides tons of frames and templates that one can use to make their stories more presentable. However, if you’re looking to make your stories cute, then the heart-shaped frames are going to be your best friend.

• Just search for heart frames in the sticker section
• Import your desired images in them.
• You can also use external tools like Canva to create heart-framed images for your stories.

17. Merge those selfies with stickers

Are you someone who doesn’t like to show their face but wants to look cute in your stories? We’ve got you covered! Go to stickers and search for “face stickers” and you’ll get tons of stickers that you can use to cover your face. You can also use some filters that provide face-covering stickers to make your stories even cuter.

18. Multiple frames and images for aesthetics

Do you know what’s better than heart-shaped frames? An aesthetic Instagram story with multiple frames! It can be super cute and attractive if you know how to use it the right way. You can select an image as your background and overlay the same image in the middle to create an effect. 

After that, you can put differently framed images on the corners of your main image and you’ll end up with a cute Instagram story for your profile.

19. Time for a Photo Dump

Are you one of those people who clicks hundreds of pictures whenever they go out for parties, hangouts, and what not? Well, guess what? You can use those random images to create a cute photo dump and post it on your Instagram stories. A photo dump can work really well in snagging tons of views for your profile and even end up on the Explore page if your story goes viral.

Customize your Stories with these Instagram Story Collage Ideas

Instagram story collages have been in trend for a very long time and need very little effort to create. You can either use the built-in IG story templates or external photo editing tools to create some cool collages for your stories. 

Finally, you top it up with some cute stickers and music to create a cute IG story that’ll snag tons of views for you. Moreover, you can always buy Instagram story views to increase your views in an instant.

Best Tips to Create Unique Story on Instagram

      1. Use gifs and stickers

Making your Instagram stories more aesthetic, pleasing, and visually appealing can be done by many ways but using gifs and stickers remains the quickest and easiest way of all. Instagram has a very vast gallery of gifs and stickers that can be used in any context to enhance your stories and make them more likable.

     2. Use filters

You can think of Instagram stickers as a magic spell. Once casted, it can make your stories 100 times better and more pleasing. However, it’s important that you use the right filters or else it can end up degrading your story as well.

     3. Create your own template

You can also try creating your own story templates in external apps like VN and Canva for a unique Instagram story. Moreover, you can also try merging these external templates with stickers from Instagram to create even better stories.

     4. Use call to actions

As we discussed, IG call to action plays a very important role in engaging your audience with your stories. You can try using call to action like:

• Which one is the best for comparisons
• New post-alert stickers

Conclusion

The Instagram Story ideas discussed in this blog have been tried and tested and will definitely reward you with more engagement, followers, and viewers on your profile and stories. We also have some detailed blogs on some of the discussed topics like How to add yours on Instagram, and hashtag strategies for more story views for you to use wisely in your stories.

You can also check out these 10 Strategies for increasing Instagram Story views in 2025 to make these Insta story ideas even more effective and get more Instagram story views with socialupshift

FAQs

1. How does Instagram rank story viewers?

Instagram has a very dynamic ranking system for the story viewers you receive on your IG stories. The algorithm would rank the viewers on the level of engagement a user has with your profile. The viewers you see at the top of the list are the ones who have either liked your story or they usually engage with your posts a lot. 

2. How do you make a catchy story on Instagram?

You can easily make your IG stories catchy and tempting by using our list of the best 19 Instagram story ideas for 2025.

3. How can I boost my story?

You can either ask your viewers to repost your story on their stories, make better stories with our creative Instagram story ideas, or buy Instagram story views from socialupshift to boost Instagram story views.

4. What to post on Instagram story?

You can post literally anything on your Instagram story. From videos to images to GIFs, anything can be uploaded on IG stories. You can check out our other blogs on the best Instagram story templates and good story ideas in case you don’t have anything to post on your stories.

5. What makes a good Instagram story?

A good Instagram story is capable of engaging the audience and making them want to see more of your content.