With evolving times, storytelling has also evolved. Today, many authors have come up with unique ways of sharing their stories using social media as a tool.
When people say “story,” you automatically think of books or films. However, aren’t there stories around us everywhere? Your closest friend telling you about how awful her week was, to the adventure your mom tells you of your pet running havoc at home. All of these snippets are nothing less than a story.
Nowadays, stories go past the “Once Upon a Time” and “Happily After”. Some of them have the power to dazzle you and hold your attention even after it’s over. However, this depends on how the author put his story across the audience and via which medium.
With evolving times, storytelling has also evolved. Today, many authors have come up with unique ways of sharing their stories using social media as a tool. “Social Media Storytelling” has changed the way of storytelling. In this article, you will get to know unique storytelling ideas that have taken the world by storm.
What Is Social Media Storytelling?
As referenced before, stories come from beyond books and films. What’s new is the creation and sharing of stories over the social media platform. Somebody posts a status on Facebook about how he became a fruitful marketer or a singer unfurls the story behind her most recent song in a video blog on YouTube. Both of these cases are narrating. All the more correctly, they’re storytelling on social media.
Social media storytelling is the way to utilize web-based media stages to recount tales about your products, services, or whatever that floats your boat. It isn’t simply one more marketing strategy to sell products or services. This tool empowers you to open your image and story to your target audience, enlighten them about your brand and also about you.
Why Is Social Media Storytelling Important?
Since quality content is everything, today’s audience wants to be engaged 24/7. So, now it’s important to post great innovative and informative content that will draw engagement within our optimal crowd.
Nonetheless, truly keen businesses and advertisers know that just posting the content isn’t the end. It’s tied in with telling a story – and brands are utilizing social media storytelling to draw in their potential viewers and convert them into clients.
With the developing pattern of Instagram and Facebook stories, apparently, the social media themselves have grasped the impact stories have and are offering features to showcase that.
Social media storytelling is the trigger to get engagements with the audience, and that is the reason it’s so amazing.
Storytelling has psychological superpowers that make it an incredible promoting apparatus:
- Emotions: When you hear a story you personally connect with, it stays with you for a long time.
- Action: These storytellings don’t just emotionally influence us. They also influence our actions and behaviors.
- Value: Stories evoke feelings like sympathy, empathy, love, pity, etc., among us. They make us feel the importance of things differently.
- Memory: You might not remember the date when World War II started, but you’ll always remember the stories of that ghastly war. Stories have a way of imprinting themselves on our memories.
Storytelling On Social Media: Your Roadmap
Strong social media storytellings are the best playground for trend spotters. Apart from the shortcomings of social media channels, is it feasible for storytellers to succeed on every social media?
Don’t worry, man! Here are several ways to become an impactful storyteller on the four most popular social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube.
Use Social Media To Skyrocket Your Business
- Type out your whole story!
No doubt, shorter posts have higher click-through rates than longer posts. But that isn’t the whole picture! Longer posts have a “See More” click to view more, which elongates the posts. This may mean that users get what they need from the post itself without having to click on another page. That’s nice if you’re sharing a story and not trying to divert traffic to another site.
Humans Of Bombay is an excellent example of long posts:
- Photo Albums
“A photo says a thousand words.” Creating a Facebook photo gallery is another perfect way to share your story with your target audience. After discovering the best times to post on Facebook, you can sprint to grab the attention of your audience! This is an ideal solution for occasions where you get a chance to take a lot of pictures that you want to share with the world.
Tesla’s photo album for better engagement:
Here’s a Bonus: Facebook also re-shares the whole album on News Feed when you add a new image to it. This enables you to share your album with more prospective people.
- Long Videos
Sometimes, even an assortment of photographs isn’t adequate to narrate your story. Here, you can consider recording the story if you have the assets and time. Facebook allows a maximum of 120 minutes long recording. Moreover, it is tweaking its algorithm to organize longer videos to connect with watchers.
Here’s an Idea: Collect video testimonials from your company’s biggest clients and colleagues, then compile them into a video form to share on Facebook.
- Live
Authenticity is a vital part of social media storytelling, and there’s no better way to be more “genuine” than going live to draw in your viewers. It is an extraordinary method to get attention for your targeted niche since Facebook positions live videos higher in the feed. Plus, it also gives you the option to record and upload it to an album.
- Captions
While an excellent picture is significant for an Instagram post, an enticing caption can assist with finishing the story. Airbnb is the #1 social media storytellers on Instagram. This is on the grounds that they utilize entrancing photographs as well as recount a short story through the inscription of every photograph.
Example: Airbnb
Visual Story
An inventive method to share on Instagram is to utilize a few photos to make a tremendous picture on your Instagram profile. So, when progressed nicely, it can look extremely beautiful.
Image Grid Size:
For Three-grid image size: 1080 pixels in height by 3,240 pixels in width.
For Six-grid image size: 2,160 pixels in height by 3,240 pixels in width.
For Nine-grid image size: 3,240 pixels in height by 3,240 pixels in width.
- Reels/ Boomerangs
Nowadays organizations are majorly focusing on Instagram videos to entice clients with short stories. Make a short 30-second or 60-second video, sharing the historical backdrop of your organization. For example one of Nike’s videos recounted a ground-breaking visual story using just words.
Nike’s Video
Here are four noteworthy hints to create the best Instagram videos:
- Be on point, specific
- Use on-screen subtitles to help narration of your story
- Use text inscriptions/gifs to develop the video story
- Square recordings are more well known than landscape ones however explore different avenues regarding both.
- Instagram Story
There’s no limit to the number of Instagram stories you can post per day, we found that 10 stories a day are a good amount. With these many stories a day, you can share quite a bit of content.
- Storm Tweets
Can’t accommodate your story into 140 characters or one tweet? Utilize more tweets! Tweetstorm is an act of sharing a line of thoughts that is longer than 140 characters through a series of tweets. They resemble small essays. Ordinarily, the tweets will begin or end with a number to show the arrangement of the tweets.
To link your tweets together, simply reply to your previous tweet. Applications like Tweetstorm and Storm makes it even easier to tweetstorm.
Example: Share your bullet point article through a Tweetstorm. Make sure to add numbering for your tweets.
- Twitter Moment
As indicated by Twitter, moments are another dynamic route for individuals to recount their accounts. They are similar to tweetstorms. However, it is more wonderful and creative. This innovative way of telling a story is a great approach to drive clicks and commitment.
- Hashtag
Hashtags can be an extraordinary method to curate stories from your locale. Famous hashtags like #MondayMotivation, #LikeAGirl, and #Competition became astonishing assortments of stories.
Another way to utilize hashtags for social media storytelling is, rather than creating a hashtag to go viral about your organization, you can likewise take advantage of an existing hashtag to share your image story. In particular, the hashtag must be important and appropriate for your image.
YouTube
- YouTube Channel
Did you realize that 85% of people in the USA, watch video content every month? No big surprise here! Video is a boon to marketing. It catches an individual’s attention more than text content.
The main and most stereotypical form of social media storytelling is Youtube videos and stories! Among all the various types of platforms, video recordings are the kinds that many people actually go-through completely.
Airbnb has a YouTube playlist and stories, which contains amazing stories from travelers using Airbnb. In the playlist, there are recordings made by both Airbnb and the locale.
Pro Tips to Enhance Your Social Media Storytelling
-
Know Your Target Audience
Prior to composing a story, ask yourself, “Who are your target audience? Who do you want to draw through your story?” You need to understand your crowd to make a convincing story that gets you good engagement.
-
Create A “Long” Story
It’s essential to take a glance at your business objectives in both the present moment and the long haul prior to building up your accounts on social media.
This helps you understand that each bit of your content adds to your image and business story, which garners the audience’s attention over the long haul. That’s the reason your story ought to associate with your ultimate objectives.
Leverage Archetypes of Social Media Storytelling
- Synecdoche
It is the utilization of a section to speak to the entire of something or the other way around. For instance, Airbnb utilizes client’s experiences and photographs to recount their image story.
- Origins
It’s an exemplary method of telling brand stories. It implies you know your audience from the very beginning. This allows you to effectively associate with your crowd and find what they want, prior to seeing or listening to your story.
- Spoilers
Always remember that your potential customers are a basic piece of your business. You can’t anticipate that your story should be effective if it’s useless to your crowd.
Meaningful Story
A fascinating story may be sufficient for viewers to tap a “like.” Yet what draws them in to buy your product or service is an important and innovative story.
At the point when you recount a story that is profoundly meaningful to the crowd, it can incite their feelings and fabricate a solid connection with your brand image.
Few Impeccable Examples…
Example 1. Land Rover: The Vanishing Game
Land Rover created an amazing story. It’s interactive and interesting, featuring a sort of road trip to England through videos, images, and other media. The connections fired the plot by visualizing Land Rover doing Land Rover stuff. It is an epic encounter as it recounts a story that feels unscripted and genuine.
There are a couple of reasons why these digital storytellings work admirably. Firstly, there is truly a story here in the most literal sense. Secondly, the brand is about experience and adventure so it ties in conveniently with an adventurous story of challenges faced during the road trip.
Lastly, possibilities are any individual who has a Land Rover will immediately relate to the story. That’s the main motive: acquiring the feelings of excitement and thrill, and you have a rollercoaster intended to market a brand.
Start your story in a real sense. Utilize your foundation to enhance it and as the feelings begin to stream, ensure your brand name is upfront.
Example 2. Airbnb
A brilliantly savvy and cool animation, “Wall and Chain” tied quickly into the global, ‘be anywhere’ feel the organization has endeavored to make. In addition, the story showcases the warmth and liveliness of the travelers and the people they meet in their journey.
Any individual who watches the activity is hit by the simplicity of the thoughts at its core. The amazing animation highlights human emotions, love, family, and the true meaning of being a worldwide citizen.
What makes it successful is that it conveys the story with simple animation. It is user-friendly and can be watched on any device. That means you can excess this movie from any part of the world.
Who would have thought that Airbnb would find a way into this sort of social media storytelling? The brand is amazing, however, this is human stuff, and universally significant.
Make your image story part of something greater and center around how the one key message can be generally passed on. It connects to what you do and makes you all the more impressive, more powerful.
Social Media Storytelling In A Nutshell
There are innumerable ways of telling stories on social media, and I hope these above-mentioned ideas have inspired you to experiment with creative ways to tell your brand’s story.
Your business’s story will engage customers, give them a glimpse of who you are, your values, and your beliefs. You just need to identify and define what that innovative story is, then use any of the social media platforms to woo your customers!
Krishna Yadav is a website developer & content marketer who loves to code, write articles, doing seo and marketing. When he’s not typing out blog posts or coding or doing marketing campaigns, you can find him reading books and doing painting. Follow his LinkedIn and Twitter pages for more information.
Storytelling stock photo by Mohd KhairilX/Shutterstock
