Swipe up

Swipe up is a gesture performed on a touchscreen by sliding a finger from the bottom upward. In the context of marketing and social media, the term is associated above all with Stories, where swipe up took the user from a full-screen piece of content straight to a destination page. Beyond that, the gesture is one of the basic ways to navigate in mobile applications.

What swipe up is

In its classic use on Instagram, the swipe up feature let creators place a clickable link to an external page in their Stories. A viewer watching an Instagram Story could swipe upward to jump to a store, article or landing page without leaving the app. It was one of the few ways to drive traffic out of Stories, which made it an important sales and influencer-campaign tool.

• Direct link from a Story — it shortened the path from content to conversion;
• Strong call to action — an animated arrow and label encouraged the gesture;
• Measurability — the number of taps let creators judge how well content performed.

In 2021 Instagram replaced swipe up with a link sticker, which, unlike the old feature, any user can add regardless of follower count. The mechanism of directing people to a page remained; only the form of interaction changed.

Practical application

The prompt to swipe up became, in marketing, a synonym for guiding the audience to the next step — whether realized by a gesture or a link sticker. Brands use it in product campaigns, time-limited promotions and creator collaborations, where a quick jump from a Story to an offer matters. An effective call to action in a Story combines engaging video with a clear message about what to do next.

Beyond social media, swipe up functions as a universal interaction pattern: it reveals a menu, expands additional content or moves to the next screen. When designing mobile interfaces, it is worth providing a clear visual cue that an element responds to an upward swipe, because not every user will discover a hidden gesture on their own.