How to Effectively Use Social Stories for Your Brand Storytelling
Social Stories have transformed the way brands create engaging content. All major social platforms have adopted Stories for sharing daily snippets, previews, teasers, and trailers for content creators and brand owners. Even more, Web Stories have also been integrated into search results to provide more bite-size, mobile-optimized audience engagement. However, data shows that only a small percentage of content creators are leveraging Stories for brand storytelling. Even fewer have mastered the medium for building their brand, showcasing their products, announcing their events, or celebrating their culture. This article provides you with insight to elevate your engagement with Stories across social media.
What are Social Stories?
Stories are social media posts that are optimized for mobile audiences. Depending on the social platform, a post can be 15 to 30 seconds long. They are best created in a vertical orientation for mobile. When sequenced together, you can make your combined Stories over a minute long. The most effective Stories squeeze the most vital content into the first seven seconds. In fact, you have the first three-seconds to capture your audience’s attention before they skip through the rest of your post. Stories posts can be ephemeral, lasting only 24 hours. Conversely, Stories can be perennial, lasting days or longer. Perennial Stories are often used as profile highlights. Let’s take a look at how Stories impact your brand storytelling.
Stories Are Essential to Your Brand Story
One of the biggest hurdles to using Stories effectively is planning your content and establishing a publishing frequency. Content planning is a matter of creation and/or curation. Creating content gives you full control over your story and the actions you want your audience to take. If you have clients using your products or services, encourage them to tag your profile so that you can curate and republish their content in your own Stories. Stories can be published daily in lieu of regular content or to augment your regular content post.
On Instagram, a lot of brand owners strive to create a cohesive look and feel to your feed. Ephemeral content often disrupts that brand discipline. This is where Stories show their true strength. You can use Stories for those short or seemingly random pieces of content that don’t fit your feed strategy but works for brand story. Let’s look at some ideas of how Stories can augment your feed content.
Best Ideas for Using Stories For Your Brand Storytelling
Stories are best used to provide a different perspective of your brand, your content, your culture, and your products. The most popular perspective is behind-the-scenes content. However, you can also use Stories as teasers for upcoming content, events, or new product announcements. Here are some ideas that you can add to your content creation and curation for brand storytelling:
- Behind-the-scenes content of how your products are made
- Pre-production and planning highlights
- Development and finishing highlights
- Build suspense or provide previews of your upcoming events
- After event highlights, remind your audience of Call-to-Actions (CTA), or follow-up events.
- Showcase corporate culture with day-in-the-life Stories
There are so many ways to use Stories for brand storytelling. Now, let’s take a look at which networks support Stories.
Which Networks Enable Social Storytelling?
Snapchat is the O.G. of Social Stories. Shortly afterwards, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook incorporated Stories into their platform. In 2020, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter introduced Stories into their platforms. Twitter rebranded Stories as Fleets. Pinterest made Stories perennial content for pinners. Google introduced Web Stories into beta and now features them in search results. Moreover, Google built a plug-in for WordPress to enable Web Stories for content creators. If you have a WordPress website, you can start using Stories to boost your SEO content.
Final Thoughts on Social Stories
One of the biggest questions I had regarding Stories is “why invest time, money, and creative resources into producing ephemeral content?” That’s a lot a time and effort to put into something that no one is going to see after 24 hours. A few things have changed since the advent of Stories. In reality, the introduction of Story Highlights changed the power of Stories for Brand Storytelling. Highlights give your best Stories a longer shelf-life. Additionally, they give you an opportunity to create a showcase reel for your brand, your products, and your community.
The most important evolution in Stories are Web Stories. Now, Stories can be used to create more traffic to your brand and grow your audience beyond your existing subscribers. Attention is the most scarce resource in our digital world. Web Stories creates a new means to garner more eyeballs on your brand than ever before. Plus, Google loves content creators that leverage their latest capabilities to create value and tell engaging stories. Are you ready to take your brand storytelling to the next level?
Add Cinemagic to Your Brand Storytelling
As a photography and digital marketing atelier, we are always innovating how our brands create engaging stories. We created our Cinemagic Brand Labs to create exciting new content for our brands and business owners. Our Real Estate Accelerator has multiple options for commercial and residential realty professionals to tell amazing Stories to create owner value. Message us today to start using Stories for your Brand Storytelling.
