Have I Got A Story For You: Using Stories On Social Media

Why Stories?

500 million people use stories every day. Stories are a great way to interact with your audience, experiment with content, and reach a wider subsection of the social media population. In 2018, a Facebook representative even said the increase in the Stories format is on a path to surpass feeds as the primary way people share things with their friends sometime next year (2019).

So, yeah… stories are no longer a place for throwaway content that has no real staying power. Stories are no longer just silly quotes, drunk nights, and delicious dishes. Stories matter! You can use stories to highlight your products, services, and features. Explore stories as a channel to highlight the more playful side of your brand. Use multiple slide stories to launch a new product or tell a customer’s story. There are many different ways to utilize the Stories format.

If you want to build strong relationships with your audience. Increase your overall engagement and get more eyes on what you offer, then Stories is going to be an essential tool! Just remember, while Stories can be more informal… as a business, everything you share on Stories should also be brand appropriate.

Story Basics

The Instagram Help Page has a lot of great FAQ’s with very detailed answers if you have any questions about the basics of Stories on Instagram. I am just including a few. All of the functionality between Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories is very similar so if you know one you pretty much can figure out the other. If you have questions you can always drop me a line and I will do my best to help out!

Sharing a Photo or Video to Stories

Ways to Use Your Stories to Get The Biggest Bang for Your Buck

Good use of Stories across platforms not only leads to good numbers for your Stories but also increased visibility, more brand recognition, and a more engaged group of followers. From Live Stories, to video, photos, polls, questions, boomerangs, quizzes. product stickers and much more the possible ways to engage your followers and build a greater following is endless. Play around with the options and see what is brand appropriate and works for your business. Review results regularly and proactively adapt as necessary.  Here are some things to keep in mind.

Cohesive but Not Identical

Your stories should “speak” to your feed posts and vice versa. Your brand identity should match, logos, fonts and phrases should be apparent,  but it is very rare that you would want to post something on both your feed and story using the same image and copy. Remember you Stories are a little bit more informal and fun, more day to day whereas your feed is a more refined and mature entity. I always think of Stories as the AAA Team and the Feed is the Major Leagues. You have some awesome players in Triple-A but they aren’t quite a Major League player. When they get to the Majors they need to learn to run with the big boys! They can do it they just need to get a bit more refined.

However, they can still work together as well. For instance, if you are running a big sale before a Holiday, you can run a feed post that advertises the sale and then during the sale, highlight certain items that will be on sale in stories. Maybe even show happy customers buying these amazing deals and leaving with smiles on their faces!

Tap into the Power of Social Media with @ Mentions

Social media is all about connections, which means that Stories are a great place to recognize those you have collaborated with, those that have given you props, and other businesses you like because an @ Mention in a story only ties you to a particular user for 24 hours. Plus the person receiving the @ Mention will love the recognition!

Sneaky Pro Tip: You can hide @ Mentions behind pictures if you like. They will still see the mention it just won’t be entirely visible.

Use the Added Interactive Features… But Don’t Overuse Them

Stickers, GIFS, Polls, Boomerangs there are so many things that you can integrate into a story to make it more engaging. Just don’t overuse these features. I promise you that we all love a boomerang of your cat… once in a while but if we see 5 of them every day, we will skip your stories for many months to come.

But using the features that solicit feedback and engage your followers is a great way to grow. Try them out, see what you like and what your followers engage with.

You can also tag stories with locations and hashtags which gets your story sometimes featured in a “location story” or “hashtag story”

They Are Called Stories for A Reason- Tell A Story

Will a series of random photos added to your story engage followers old and new? Possibly. A good visual does tend to have power especially on Instagram but what if your visuals were great and they all worked together to tell a story? HOMERUN and second baseball reference in this blog. Put your visual storytelling skills to the test and weave together some great visuals with a few well-placed items of text and see if you can’t create a powerful brand story, product reveal or another engaging piece of content.

Recently, the engagement and reach on my Stories has been increasing but I was still seeing a big drop off after the first few Stories. On average I would drop 31% of impressions and a similar percentage in reach every 3 consecutive slides. But this Thursday I flexed my storytelling muscles and created a narrative about a project I was working on that continued over 15 slides (btw too long go shorter). But amazingly, after all, 15 slides I had a drop off of just 11%!JTBBJTNDaWZyYW1lJTIwd2lkdGglM0QlMjI1NjAlMjIlMjBoZWlnaHQlM0QlMjIzMTUlMjIlMjBzcmMlM0QlMjJodHRwcyUzQSUyRiUyRnd3dy55b3V0dWJlLmNvbSUyRmVtYmVkJTJGTkdOOGJIUDN0bTQlMjIlMjBmcmFtZWJvcmRlciUzRCUyMjAlMjIlMjBhbGxvdyUzRCUyMmFjY2VsZXJvbWV0ZXIlM0IlMjBhdXRvcGxheSUzQiUyMGVuY3J5cHRlZC1tZWRpYSUzQiUyMGd5cm9zY29wZSUzQiUyMHBpY3R1cmUtaW4tcGljdHVyZSUyMiUyMGFsbG93ZnVsbHNjcmVlbiUzRSUzQyUyRmlmcmFtZSUzRSUwQQ==

Streamline Your Story Creation

You want Stories to be on Brand. But they disappear after 24 hours. So why no create reusable templates for some of your regular content. You could spend hours each week creating appealing content that will disappear in less time than it took you to perfect it or you could create templates that were brand appropriate with a visible logo and proper colors. Then they are easy to reuse, week after week. This is an awesome tip especially if you like our next one.

Treat Stories Like A TV Channel and Schedule Content for Specific Days

Plan out your social media content and theme it together. Followers will know when to expect content to be released and if you are releasing great content every let’s say Thursday, you are essentially creating “Must See IG!” Get it! It could be as simple as New Products Monday. New Blog Post Tuesday. Wednesday is Food Feature. So on and so on. Or another option is to ask a question on Monday. Post a funny story on Tuesday. Ask followers for input Wednesday. But creating and engaging with content becomes easier when you know what is coming.

Consistency is Essential You Are Building Trust

Stories are another way to get your followers to like, know, engage with, and trust your business. Consistency is an essential part of this trust building. Customers can’t get to know you if you aren’t posting consistently. The less consistently you post the lesser chance you have of seeing growth on social media. Use stories to your advantage by being consistent and see how consistency can provide a real advantage against your inconsistent competitor. Consistency will help you build brand recognition online and offline faster. Inconsistent messaging leads to gaps in memory of your brand and general confusion about your brand.

Remember that if you post consistently but messaging is off-brand, or not clearly branded for your company you may be harming yourself despite your best efforts.

You Worked Hard for Those 10K Followers

If you worked hard for those 10K and you are able to put a Call to Action in your Stories… Do it! Don’t waste them but use them. The “swipe up” feature in Instagram’s Stories is an amazing way to direct traffic to your site. Just one simple swipe up and boom. Just don’t overuse it, if you have a call to action on every story people are quickly going to ignore it and that defeats the purpose of such a powerful feature.

Tips from The Pros (and Me)

So while writing this blog I figured I would reach out to some friends to get some tips from the real Pros on what you should and shouldn’t do on the Stories platform… But before we get to the real Pros… I get to go!

JRH Graphics

1. Keep it short, sweet and valuable- always keep in mind what your follower may get out of any content you share.
2. Minimize text and maximize visual storytelling. Stronger less interrupted images for bigger impact
3. Please don’t put a Call to Action in every frame

Blonde in the District

1. While stories are a more informal representation of your brand, they are still a representation of your brand. So its important that you are always on brand.
2. Don’t make your stories too long, people lose interest and you lose engagement.
3. However tempting, don’t go off on a rant in your stories. Even a brand appropriate rant. (DM Jonathan and rant to him)

www.blondeinthedistrict.com

Stitch & Rivet

1. Do a project with your followers and get them invested and involved over the course of the project (story).
2. It’s called Stories. Don’t forget to tell a story!
3. Go to @stitchandrivet on Instagram and check out the Military Duffle highlight for Storytelling in A Story Done right

https://www.shopstitchandrivet.com/

This is Made in DC

1. Pay attention to your overall appearance and cohesion of story from one frame to the next. Even in a single frame that is important
2. Keep it fun and playful. Many times they include a cool GIF!

http://thisismadeindc.com/

Wrapping It All Up

The success of the Stories Format is not a surprise to anyone in the marketing world. Stories are the perfect medium to tell the story of a brand in bitesize, easy to digest parts. Branding and Marketing are all based on the concept of storytelling so why wouldn’t a usable and versatile tool like the Stories platform win? Stories help businesses tell their story. Stories (the ones the businesses tell) sell. Actually, Stories (the ones on social media) also sell! Use them, experiment, but stay active and engaging.

Share your wins and losses as well as pro tips with us we would love to hear from you! And look for some Instagram Story hack videos from Jonathan this week on his Instagram Stories of course!