Why You Should Be Using Social Stories
Do you actively pursue digital marketing for your business or organization? If you do and you haven’t yet experimented with social stories you need to check them out ASAP!
Social stories can easily be overlooked by marketers. They often only last for 24hrs and just don’t seem as substantial as actual posts. So what makes the story format worth your time? Let’s dive in.
Social Platforms
Within this guide we will primarily focus on Facebook and Instagram stories, as they are the most popular formats and will help you see the greatest business benefits in the shortest amount of time. However, once you have familiarize yourself with Facebook and Instagram stories it is worth it to explore other platforms to see how you can continue to leverage the story format. Consider these additional options:
Benefits of Social Stories
This might be the most obvious benefit, but one major advantage of social media stories is that they can be substantially less time intensive than carefully constructing a full social post. This is perfect if you need to get information out quickly to your audience, or have a larger quantity of content you want to share and don’t want to have to spend time curating one piece for a post. Have an event coming up and want to remind your audience? Social stories are perfect for reminding your audience without having to create a full post on the topic.
Social stories can also offer a more personal way to interact with your audience. This is partially due to the fact that most social stories only last for 24hrs, so you do not have to worry quite as much about what you post being fully polished and comprehensive. Many content creators use social stories to connect with their audience more intimately, giving them a unique inside look into their brand/life/organization/identity that you would not otherwise be able to find. Walking your audience through your daily routine, sharing special BTS shots of your product creation process, or teasing upcoming releases allows your viewers to feel more connected with you on a personal level.
The level of customization inherent in social stories also has a leg up on social posts. Many platforms allow you to share links, ask questions, generate polls, or even include custom GIF’s which really boosts engagement with this format. Using social stories in this way is a great way to source answers to a brand related question, get feedback on different options you are considering for your brand, or just generally learn more about your audience. These features can provide valuable insights when it comes to making important business decisions.
Additionally, social stories on Instagram have recently released a feature that allows any user to embed a link to an external web page on an Instagram story. This feature, previously only available once you hit a certain follower count, is a game changer in that it allows you to direct traffic to an external source within the Instagram platform, which was previously not an option outside of a link in your bio. Facebook stories do not yet offer this feature innately, but may eventually add this to their stories capabilities.
One final benefit of social stories is that it can help bypass ever-changing algorithms on social platforms, in which some posts just do not seem to reach the same number of people. Located at the very top of the screen for both Facebook and Instagram, social stories are a sure fire way of making sure your audience sees your latest content. We recommend sharing many of your recent posts to your story so your audience is aware of the new content.
Using Issuu for Social Story Creation
Issuu’s Visual Story feature is the perfect way to quickly transform your long form content into a social story ready format. In order to create a visual story, simply select the publication you have uploaded to Issuu that you would like to use to create a visual story. Then, select the “create visual story” icon.
You will then be prompted to select the theme for your visual story. There are currently three options on Issuu that you can choose from for your unique story. These themes range from a modern to a more classic aesthetic.
Then select what pages of your publication you want to pull the content from for your story, and fully customize the images and text of the story itself. If you only want to showcase one individual article within your larger publication, only select those pages to make the process easier.
Once you have customized the story to your liking, select share, and then click the “Download Visual Story” button. The story will then be saved to your device as a .mp4 file which you can use to share on any social story platform. It’s as simple as that!
For social media marketers, small business owners, content creators, and anyone who wants to increase the reach of their content, social media stories are a quick way to increase engagement and interaction across all channels in a manner of minutes.
Looking to improve your use of all social platforms? Check out these Issuu blog posts:
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