Digital storytelling is widely used for persuasion towards impacting human behaviour. The popularity of social media enables the use of digital storytelling to target persuasion, known as influence. The introduction of ephemeral entities, referred to as the “stories” feature, elevated digital storytelling in social media to a new level. Investigating the associated methods to understand the persuasion process through digital storytelling is essential. It has been a trend on social media since the advent of new features called “stories,” which allow influencers to produce ephemeral stories rather than wall posts. As the popularity of ephemeral digital stories in social media is increasingly realised, it is vital to explore how those stories can be persuasive to convince the viewers to go along with the story’s intention. Accordingly, this study explores Instagram stories, a popular ephemeral storytelling platform, to evident how an ephemeral digital story can be a persuasive digital story. Instagram stories were discovered to use many persuasive elements to be persuasive ephemeral digital stories. This study used the theories of digital storytelling, persuasive communication, and persuasive technology to explore the operationalisation of persuasive elements. The study concluded that ephemeral social media stories could be used as a persuasive tool.