How to Change Your Instagram Story Background Color
How to Change Your Instagram Story Background color in just a few simple steps – plus more tips on Instagram Story design!
Posted 2 years ago
Written by
Julia CohenPosted 2 years ago
As Instagram Stories have evolved, they’ve begun to offer users more ways to use text, stickers, and interactive polls to engage with followers. These engagement tools are especially important now that other platforms have introduced their own versions of stories.
Creating simple Stories is part of your larger content strategy, but you might not always have a photo or video content to use. If you want to learn how to change the background color on an Instagram story, or just want to spice up the aesthetic of your Stories, at Flick, we will show you how to change your Instagram Story background!
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Why Should You Care About Your Instagram Stories?
Since Instagram rolled out its Stories feature in August 2016, there has been a 400% rise in the number of people viewing them daily. Currently, over 500 million Instagram accounts view at least one story a day. In other words, Stories offer businesses, influencers, and brands an invaluable way to connect with their audiences.
Aside from these impressive user-base statistics, there are plenty of other equally compelling reasons to prioritize Instagram Stories as part of your content strategy:
Instagram Stories Support Links
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of a call-to-action button in marketing. A CTA button allows users to quickly and conveniently buy a product, sign up for an email list, follow you on social media—basically, do whatever the desired action was.
On Instagram, Stories are the only content medium that supports links and CTA buttons. This alone makes them an incredibly powerful tool for generating valuable engagement.
Instagram Stories Are Visible For 24 Hours
This is one of the most impactful traits of Instagram Stories. Most Instagram users are incredibly active at certain times on certain days. At Flick, we call this the “golden hour.”
There’s a problem, though. This golden hour will be different depending on the timezone of the user in question! That means, even if you use a tool like Flick’s Audience Analytics suite to determine the optimal time for a feed post, a considerable portion of your audience is likely going to miss out!
Instagram Stories solve this problem by allowing brands and influencers an opportunity to reach their audiences for a full 24 hours. In other words, they give all of your followers an equal chance to engage with your content.
Instagram Stories Are More Competitive
The algorithm Instagram uses to rank feed posts exists to curate a meaningful feed for end users. Usually, this means limiting the visibility of promotional posts in favor of posts from friends, family members, and celebrities.
While Instagram Stories rankings are also governed by complex algorithms, the fact of the matter is that there are far fewer Stories than feed posts. As a result, it’s much easier for brands and businesses to engage with users through Stories.
Instagram Stories Are Highly Interactive
It’s no secret that Instagram has invested a ton of time and resources into making Stories fun and interactive for users. The Stories feature has evolved to support links, polls, surveys, slide bars, custom fields, GIFs, text, videos, quizzes, countdowns—the list goes on and on!
All of these features are powerful tools for connecting with your audience. Plus, a few of them—mainly polls, surveys, and custom fields—are great for conducting simple consumer research.
We could go on and on about the importance of Instagram Stories… but we’ll have to save that for another article. Now, it’s time to get the matter at hand:
How To Change An Instagram Story Background To Solid A Color
Step 1: Select or Take Your Story Photo
The first thing you’ll need to do is upload the photo that will form the basis of your Story post. You can upload an existing photo from your camera roll or take a new one using Instagram’s camera—up to you!
As we walk through this process, we’ll be using the beautiful photo above (taken via Instagram’s camera) as an example.
Step 2: Resize The Photo
Once you’ve chosen your photo, you may want to resize it to fit your needs. Instagram can display Story photos in full, zoomed in, or zoomed out. Simply pinch your fingers on the uploaded photo and resize it to fit your needs!
Note: You won’t be able to resize photos taken directly with Instagram’s camera. If that’s an issue, switch to your main camera to take the photo and upload it from your camera roll!
Step 3: Select The Pen Tool
Next, you’ll want to find the three-dot menu at the top right of your screen and tap it. When you do this, a drop-down menu should pop up. Tap the scribble icon at the top of the drop-down menu to open up a set of drawing and decorating tools.
The pen icon on the right side of the top-bar menu allows you to make solid markings on the image in the color of your choice. This is the option you’ll want to tap if you want a solid background color.
Step 4: Select Your Color
Once you’ve tapped on the pen, you’ll be able to choose from a wide selection of colors curated by Instagram. Instagram’s drawing tools have nine different standard colors to choose from.
In addition, Instagram provides a custom color palette that’s complementary to the photo you uploaded. These are great for adding pops of color that mesh well with your branding or marketing materials. Finally, there’s a dropper tool on the far left of the color slider that you can use to identify and draw with colors from your photos.
Step 5: Apply The Background Color
The next step is applying your chosen color to the background of the image. There are two ways to do this—the easy way and the even easier way.
The easy way is to use your finger to scribble over the image until all the desired sections are covered with your chosen color. The easier way is to tap and hold on to the image for about two seconds and then release it. When you lift your finger up, the entire photo will fill with whatever color you have selected.
Step 6: Add The Finishing Touches
Once you’ve applied your background color, it’s time for the finishing touches. You can then insert text, GIFs, images, or drawings on top of your new background!
Want to take it a step further? By using the eraser tool, you can erase parts of your new colored background, to reveal sections of your original image.
Step 7: Save The Results
Finally, you’re ready to save the post to your drafts. Navigate back to the three-dot menu and this time click on the “Save” icon. You’ll be able to locate the story in your drafts and can edit or post it at a later date.
How To Change An Instagram Story Background To A Transparent Color
What do you do if you want to set your Instagram story background to a transparent color? Well, the process looks almost identical to the one we just described. The only difference is that instead of selecting the pen option, you select the highlighter option.
Let’s quickly walk through it:
Step 1: Select or Take Your Story Photo
This step is the exact same as before. Refer to the guide above if you need a refresher!
Step 2: Resize The Photo
Again, no changes with this step.
Step 3: Select The Highlighter Tool
Again, you’ll want to tap on the three-dot menu. From there, tap the scribble icon.
Now, instead of tapping on the pen icon, tap on the highlighter icon.
Step 4: Select Your Color
With the highlighter tool selected, you’ll be able to browse the same color options as with the pen tool. The only difference is that when applied, highlighter colors are transparent.
Step 5: Apply The Background Color
Once you’ve selected a highlighter color, either draw over the image with your finger or tap and hold to fill the image.
As you can see, the applied color acts a bit like a filter over whatever image you have beneath it. This is a great way to make any image fit within your brand’s color scheme.
How To Change An Instagram Story Background To An Image
So far, we’ve covered two ways of changing the background color of your Instagram Stories. However, both of these options are fairly limited in terms of the level of detail you can get (unless you’re an Instagram drawing tool artist).
If you’re looking for detailed background, you’ll probably want to choose a premade Instagram Story background.
Keep reading to learn how:
Step 1: Find A Background Image
The first thing you need to do is source the image you want to use as the background for your Instagram Story. In some cases, you might have a branded background you’d like to use. In others, you might want to search online for premade options.
If you’re looking for beautiful images to use as backgrounds for Stories, there are a few places we recommend looking:
Note: Make sure you check the licensing information for the photos you choose! There are many great free options available, but some specify that they aren’t for commercial use.
Step 2: Set The Background Image
Once you’ve downloaded the image you want to use, it’s time to upload it to Instagram. To do this, simply tap on your profile picture in the upper-left of your feed and select the photo you’ve chosen from your camera roll.
The photo you select will appear in the story editor the same way it would if you’d taken it with Instagram’s built-in camera.
Step 3: Edit The Background Image
Once the photo is uploaded, it’s time to get creative. You can embellish your Story background with the drawing tools we mentioned above or with any of Instagram’s many customization features.
You can mess around with filters, polls, links, text, images—whatever you think will help your story stand out and connect with your followers.
Step 4: Save The Results
Finally, you’ll want to save the edited Story to your drafts!
We hope you enjoyed this quick tutorial on how to change the color of your Instagram background! Remember to keep up to date with our Instagram How To section, for more handy hacks and tricks like this, in order to keep your Instagram game up to scratch.
Let us know what other tricks you want to learn by leaving a comment, or sending us a DM on Instagram! And, if you want to learn a little more about how we can help you increase your organic growth on Instagram by 40%, just click the banner below.
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