More and more people are spending time on their mobile devices as they continue to practice physical distancing, due to COVID19, leading to a significant increase in social media usage across North America.

Social media stories – like Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories – are also blowing up in the digital marketing world. And for good reason.

The results they are getting are staggering.

• Facebook Stories has more than 500 million users.
• Nearly 7 billion accounts use Instagram Stories daily.
• 1 in 4 Millennials and Gen Z-ers look for stories of the products or services they want to buy.
• Three million advertisers have bought Stories ads across Facebook’s family of apps.

However, the trouble with stories is that the content is ephemeral – meaning it disappears after 24 hours. So, to keep up with stories companies need to be creating lots of content every single day. That can quickly add up.

But don’t give up on stories just yet. There are many ways to create them – and some more expensive than others.

Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook filters make it easy to create interactive stories and add additional styling to them that can help to humanize a brand.

In fact, today’s businesses are actually finding that more off-the-cuff stories are performing better than professionally produced ones! For example, Rick Mulready, a Facebook ads expert, recently commented on the Online Marketing Made Easy podcast that one of his most popular ads is a video of himself walking down the street.

Stories don’t need to be high budget to make a big splash. In some cases, the less flashier, the better!

Some common types of stories:

1. Process – following someone through a process – such as a walk, an event, an outing, or something at work.
2. Talking head – someone talking about something important to them or their business. Sharing a funny story from their day or something new they are excited about.
3. Resharing – taking links that are sent to you, questions and posts that you are tagged on, and resharing it on your story.

Think of yourself as a producer.

You will start with a storyboard – what do you want to document, share, and talk about?

• What will your slides consist of? What do you want to share/present on each Story? Stories don’t have to be all video – or even include any video at all. You can use photos with text treatments, or even just text on a colourful background, and tell your story visually.
• Which slides will be interactive? For example, on Instagram, you can ask someone to indicate on a scale how much they like something or invite them to ask you a question or ask them a question. Which stories will you include this option on?
• What is the call to action? What do you want your viewers to do at the end of your story? Swipe up for a link, shop a product, simply become a follower, stay tuned for the next story, etc.

The cool thing about stories is that because they can be exported to video and stored on your phone you can use them to create content for your business, which is far less expensive than having a video professionally produced.

You can also use the story capability to build slideshows and other digital materials that you later export as video.

Have you thought about adding stories to your business? What’s stopping you?

The Purpose Company can help you create a long-term social media stories strategy and execute it. Contact us today. Call 647-880-9709 or visit www.thepurposecompany.ca.