Storytelling is nothing new, but storytelling on social media is how you keep and grow your followers.

The internet is one of the greatest technological innovations in the history of mankind. Since the 1990s the internet, or “world wide web” as we called it during the “dial-up days,” has become a part of our everyday lives. With the evolution of the internet came social media, and now social media has evolved as well. Snapchat and Instagram are great apps for storytelling on social media.

Posting a status update is still beneficial for your business but organic reach has gone down significantly over the past few years. Snapchat and Instagram Stories have helped in becoming a remedy for this as these platforms don’t hide your content from your followers. However, the tricky part is telling a great story in order for your followers to stay engaged for the duration of the story. Let’s dive into how to tell a great story for social media.

Subject Matters!

One of the major problems with storytelling on social media is the fact that people just post for the sake of posting. You’re told by social media experts that you need to post every single day. What if you don’t have anything worth saying that day? Do you still post? I believe social media should serve a greater purpose for your business, rather than posting just to post. This is where storytelling on social media comes into play.

Think about the story you want this post to tell to your customers. Is there something you do that they may not know about? Or maybe you want to do a “meet the team” type of post. Your subject and content will be the most important part of telling your story on social media.

Be Concise

A few weeks ago, we took a poll of our followers to find out how many Instagram Story slides someone would watch before leaving. The average answer we received was 4-5 slides. This is not a lot of time to tell your story.

If you do video stories, this gives you approximately 60 seconds to get your point across before people are leaving. So how do you get them to stay? Set up your story to have a beginning, middle, and end.

Tell your audience why you’re using the stories platform today. Your first slide should ALWAYS be the most creative as this is the first slide your audience will see when they click to watch your story.

In the next slide, show or tell them more about the topic you’re talking about. Finally, wrap things up with a goodbye. You can even ask a question or have your followers vote with a poll to see if this story was helpful to them.

Engage With Your Followers

I’ll always try to work in a blurb about engagement when I write my blogs. Once you begin to see people react to your storytelling on social media, you’ll want to talk to them. If someone asks you a question or sends you a message about your story you should ALWAYS respond.

You don’t have to type out a letter but even a couple of emojis will suffice. Engagement is an important aspect of storytelling on social media because it allows you to acknowledge your audience and everyone feels good when they’re acknowledged.

Storytelling on social media will help you gain a passionate following about your product or service. The more personal you’re able to get with your story, the more people will feel they can relate to you.

The whole point of Instagram Stories and Snapchat is to tell a captivating STORY for your audience. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go post a screenshot of my new fantasy football roster.

If you would like to learn more about how we can help you with social media, contact us.

If you want to learn more about storytelling on social media, be sure to reach out to us today. Let’s chat!