The Perfect Number Of Instagram Stories To Post Is Three
Life is full of pointless tasks. For me that's watching every single Instagram Story on my feed. Every single time I open Instagram, those purple/orange circles taunt me. People are doing things. I must consume them, lest I miss out. It's maddening! Every day presents a fresh feed of stories that I feel obligated to sit through.
So, instead of interrogating my own relationship with Instagram Stories or taking any sort of personal responsibility for healthier phone use, I'd like to suggest a new arbitrary standard for proper Instagram Story use that I think everyone should follow. I believe that the perfect amount of Instagram Stories to post in one 24 hour period is three. You can certainly post less than three, but in almost any case anything more than three is too much.
For the uninitiated: Nearly two years ago Instagram launched Stories, a new feature that let users post photos and videos to their profile that expire after 24 hours. For an app that found success through encouraging folks to post carefully-considered photos that depicted their life in the absolute best light possible, stories loosened the collar a little bit. Stories were also a straight-up rip off of Snapchat stories. Nevertheless, the masses spoke nearly a year later when Instagram Stories users surpassed that of Snapchat. Now, some 300 million people use Instagram Stories on a daily basis.
In the old days, making sure you were caught up on your friends' best lives was a simple process of thumbing through photo after photo — doling out likes by whatever standards you invented — until you got to the post that you left off on whenever it was that you last opened Instagram. This still somewhat holds true today, although the introduction of an algorithmically-sorted feed means that you won't see everyone's posts at once. Thumbing through the feed isn't really a viable way to keep tabs on folks anymore.
The only thing on Instagram that still reliably lets you know you've seen all there needs to be seen are Stories. This would, otherwise, be fine were it not for two issues: there are some genuinely good posts, and they all expire after 24 hours. The scarcity and urgency that Stories present is nearly impossible to ignore. For every 7 posts of folks enjoying a perfectly fine, but unremarkable, dinner, there is an exciting personal announcement. For every dozen posts of folks hanging out at the beach, there is one person giving us an intimate tour of their garden. To put another way, there's a lot one needs to sit through in order to find the gems, the Good Posts.
This isn't to say this is some kind of anti-posting screed. Posting, even it it's just for yourself, can be an empowering thing. But given how Instagram Stories are designed — enticing users with bright colors, playing on their latent FOMO and then pulling them into a slideshow-like experience that autoplays until there's nothing left to consume —I think it's worth considering how you're contributing to someone's Instagram Story Debt. We can't really change the exploitative design of Stories, but we can at least mitigate its pull. This is why I believe that the perfect amount of stories to post in a single day is three.
How did I arrive at this number? Well, let's look at limits of an Instagram Story. A still photo will display for 5 seconds, while a video will run for a maximum of 15 seconds. Given that, based on an informal survey of my own feed, the average person follows anywhere between 250-700 accounts. If a third, or even a half of those accounts are posting a handful of stories per day that's somewhere between 10 minutes to a full half-hour of Instagram Stories to watch. Sure, you can mute and skip through them, but if that one guy you went on two dates with is watching your Stories, it's safe to assume we're all just kinda churning through this stuff.
By posting no more than three Stories per day, you're, at the most, asking folks to sit through somewhere between 15-45 seconds worth of stuff; and at the least, you're asking them to just tap three times to move on if they don't really care. Which is fine! They can't all be zingers.
When you're posting enough stories to turn those ever-present bars at the top of every story into a series of dots, well, you're being awfully presumptuous. Posting enough stories to take up the better part of a coffee break places an uncomfortable decision on the viewer. Do you watch what might be minutes of a person's everyday activities like eating or watching television? Do you tap through them like a maniac just to Clear The Feed? Do you skip them, and thus leave your feed with unseen stories? I know it's a weird thing to get mad about! But it feels like this wrinkle of Living Online is something that can be avoided if we just… think before we post.
This is the beauty of posting three stories. It's enough to say something, but not long enough to inconvenience anyone. Instagram stories are used a little time killers. You watch them while you're waiting for food, or a train, or someone to get out of the bathroom. You're not trying to change anyone's lives here, just offer fleeting moments to brighten the dull parts of others' days. The best reaction one should shoot for is "Oh, cool," or "Haha." If you can't do this in three stories, perhaps it's not worth posting in the first place.
Thankfully, I am not the only person on this planet who gets frustrated and this insignificant and specific thing. A quick poll of the Digg staff found that the sweet spot seems to be around three to four stories, though the common throughline is a collective anxiety over the size of the rectangles.
"When the little preview squares start getting too small, I'm out," says Avery Driggers, commerce lead here at Digg. "No story is funny enough for 10 separate posts."
Alanna Okun, a senior editor at Racked, also gets frustrated by the Instagram Story posting habits of the people she follows. "I literally feel viscerally anxious when I open a —————- Instagram story!," she writes in an email. "It's like I have to get out of there immediately! Too much commitment IMO."
Even though Instagram Stories has far-outpaced Snapchat, there are still some learnings that can be brought over from the app that has now pivoted to sunglasses. "My carryover rule from Snapchat is that demanding more than a minute of your followers' time is rude and excessive no matter how cool your rich friend's boat is" says Digg social editor Joey Cosco.
That said, as with most rules, there are exceptions. Caroline Moss, co-author of Hey Ladies and general expert on internet etiquette, suggests that if you've got some kind of narrative arc going on, that you can break the three-post rule. What might that look like? Okun points out that if you're somewhere cool, like a museum, then you can post as much as you'd like.
While the three-post rule concerns itself with quantity, the idea that you only have three posts per day will hopefully encourage some self-reflection on quality. If you're posting multiple stories on a Saturday just to show to the world that you're out there Doing Stuff, well, I think people can see that. It sounds obvious, but good posting online requires that you share something wholly unique. If you think just existing on this planet is a unique experience worth posting more than three times per day about, then perhaps the issue is not with Instagram Stories.
