Instagram Stories are a great way to integrate video into your marketing strategy. If you’re already investing time and money in this successful strategy, might as well feature Stories on your website too, right?

Well lucky you, Fastory recently released a free widget to add Instagram Stories directly to your site to feature your nifty marketing efforts on desktop. Even though mobile is still dominant with younger generations, desktop users need some love and access to Stories, too.

Fastory CEO Sylvain Weber noted the “widget is the only one fully based on the brand new Instagram Graph API (no private API, validated by Facebook himself).” This pretty much means Fastory is ahead of the game with the newly opened up API, and are basically development pioneers.

Drive awareness and build loyalty by spreading the wonder of your Instagram Stories far and wide with the Stories Widget. Simply log in to Facebook to get the widget, then sync your Instagram Stories stream.

Next, all you have to do is copy the provided HTML code and paste it on your website. Hooray, now you have a widget that automatically updates your website with your latest Stories.

Keep in mind you’ll need an Instagram Business Account for this to work.

If you have more than one business Instagram linked to Facebook Pages, just select the one you want to use from the drop-down menu when getting the widget code.

You can continue that process to select multiple Instagram accounts and generate widget codes for each of them.

Free for a limited time, you can also utilize the Memories feature, keeping a collection of your Instagram Stories on your site instead of having them disappear after twenty-four hours like usual.

All the Stories featured on your site also include a “follow us” button to encourage user engagement and gain you more followers.

Looking for help jazzing up your Instagram Stories? Fastory was originally created as an easy to use design platform to create and customize Stories.

Their mobile-first marketing suite offers drag & drop design featuring animated headlines crafted in Adobe After Effects, fonts from Google Web Fonts, and motion design.

Story creation and editing is collaborative with varying roles and levels of privileges. Plus, you can track visitors in real time to identify drop off points and areas for improvement. Contact Fastory for Story creation pricing information.

And on the free end of things, check out the Instagram Story Widget.

It’s been over a year since Instagram (or “Insta” as the cool kids call it) launched their Stories feature. And while Instagram Stories may not seem like most obvious place for advertising your business, social media experts say that it has untapped potential as a marketing tool.

The seemingly biggest drawback of using Stories for marketing is that, taking a cue from Snapchat, Instagram Stories are only online for 24 hours, then they disappear forever.

Nonetheless, the analysts at Socialbakers say that businesses should seriously consider marketing via Stories. These experts looked at over 1,000 Instagram accounts from businesses and found that they are being underutilized as a marketing tool.

Stories are extremely popular amongst viewers. There are 300 million active users looking at Stories every day, and that number hasn’t stopped growing since Instagram launched the feature.

Stories also appear at the very top of a user’s feed – although we’re still not exactly sure how Instagram’s algorithms sort these posts.

It’s also important to note that users can’t “like” or leave comments on Stories, so you won’t be able to use these metrics to gauge the success of your Stories marketing. Instead, you’ll have to look at Total Impressions, which tells you how many people have seen your story, or Reach, which tells you how many brand new potential customers saw your story.

With social media platforms always changing their rules and algorithms, it’s getting harder and harder to reach new potential customers, especially without dishing out cash for paid or boosted ads. Stories is a great loophole that allows you to connect with your audience without paying for it.

Don’t get caught up thinking you have to make a high-production video. Short, rough-cut, unpolished videos work great for Stories and give your audience a behind-the-scenes view of your business. Stories can be utilized to tell the story of your brand. And you can even add a poll to your story to increase engagement. For example, Red Bull asks viewers which picture they should post next, keeping the user engaged and clicking.

Social media platforms are always changing, but your business can get an edge over your competitors by staying up-to-date with new formats and features.

Facebook has been collecting data from both users and non-users across the internet, and Europeans are not having it.

A Belgian court has ruled that Facebook violates privacy laws by using technologies like cookies, plug-ins, and pixels, to track internet users’ browsing behaviors on up to 10,000 websites, whether or not users even have a Facebook account. A similar ruling was handed down by a German court just last week.

The legal battle began in 2015 when the Belgian Privacy Commission brought a civil suit against Facebook, who attempted to argue, unsuccessfully, that because their European headquarters is in Ireland, they are outside of the jurisdiction of Belgian law.

Nonetheless, the Belgian court is charging Facebook fines of €250,000 per day, up to €100 million, or 124,000 million U.S. dollars, if they fail to comply. The court has ordered FB to cease tracking Belgian internet users and to destroy the data they’ve already collected.

What’s Facebook’s excuse for non-consensually gathering so much data? As usual, they try to sell users on giving up their privacy for a more “relevant” ad experience. But we all know this is just a coded way of saying that they do it for the advertisers.

Facebook also claims that this data gathering is consensual and that users have the option to opt out. “We require any business that uses our technologies to provide clear notice to end-users, and we give people the right to opt-out of having data collected on sites and apps off Facebook being used for ads,” says Richard Allen, Facebook’s vice president for public policy in Europe.

However, the court, and Belgian privacy watchdog groups, say that many of Facebook’s tracking mechanisms are invisible to the user, and that privacy controls are preset to opt-in, with opt-out options difficult to find. The Belgian court also says that Facebook isn’t being clear enough about how the data they’re collecting is being used.

Facebook plans to appeal the ruling, and the case could very well end up in the CJEU, Europe’s supreme court. The social media giant will probably have an increasingly difficult time getting away with tracking practices after the EU passes new rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, in May.