Social media is constantly evolving, and one of the latest ways this is happening is the popularity of using stories as part of your social media strategy.
Over the past few years, many social media platforms have introduced a stories feature to their interface. Taking inspiration from the once-popular Snapchat, platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and now, Twitter and LinkedIn, have followed suit and allow users to create a more ‘live’ and authentic feel to their social media accounts.
If you are new to using stories as part of your business marketing strategy, we have put some ideas together below to help you get started.
What’s the difference between social media feed posts and story posts?
Feed posts are what visitors will see when they scroll through your social media profile. You can add graphics, photos and videos, and embellish them with a well-written caption. You may also wish to include things like geotagging, hashtags and tagging other users or businesses. Once posted, feed posts remain on your social media account forever (unless you delete them).
Story posts are designed to be a little less planned out than feed posts. They are there to add more personality and encourage users to interact with your business more. Story posts remain visible on your social media profile for 24 hours.
How can you use feed and story posts together?
If we use the analogy of your social media profile being a house, think of traditional feed posts as the bricks of your house, and story posts as the interior decor ‘extras’ that you add in here and there to slowly build your perfect home.
You should always keep your feed posts regularly updated, but on top of this you can start adding in extra story posts to add more temporary content.
An example of a great way that the two can work together is if you are sharing a blog post on social media. In your feed, you would post just one graphic telling people that a new blog post has been added to your website. However, on your stories, you could add 4 or 5 different snippets, allowing you to embellish and add much more information.
What are the benefits of using social media stories?
Using stories effectively can really help to make your business stand out from the crowd. Social media users tend to look at stories much more than traditional feed posts (the current algorithms also have an impact on this). Other benefits of stories include:
Creating a sense of FOMO
Stories have an extremely short lifespan (24 hours). This may seem like a drawback, but the fleeting, urgent nature of these is actually what makes them appealing and they create that FOMO (fear of missing out) in some audiences, which can actually drive users to seek out this engaging content.
Being authentic
Social media stories tend to be more casual by nature, so give off a more authentic look and feel. You may show some behind the scenes footage, or some videos of yourself that you wouldn’t necessarily post as part of your regular content.
Content efficiency
With stories, businesses can keep a steady stream of content in front of followers without creating a backlog of content for people to navigate through. Stories keep your content moving through a fresh cycle.
How often should you post?
This is a question we get asked often, and honestly there is no straightforward answer to this. The frequency of your posts will depend on several factors including the nature of your business, how engaging your current followers are and how much time you have to dedicate to social media content. Ideally, we would suggest posting a feed post 5-6 times a week, and a story post at least once a day.
What types of content can you post on stories?
- Share your own feed posts
- Share posts from other accounts
- Templated graphics
- Photos
- Short Videos
- Text-based announcements
- Polls
- Q&As
- Include hashtags, geotags and mention other accounts
If you are still in the dark about how social media can help your business try reading our blog on ‘A beginners guide to using social media for business’ offering you a clear, easy to understand overview to help get you off the ground running.
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