Social Media Stories: The Marketing Appeal of 24 Hours

“Stories” on social media offer your audience a direct line of access to your business. If you use it to your advantage, this enhanced visual medium could save you money on your content marketing campaign.

A Field of Growth

Two years ago, stories didn’t exist on social media. These real-time (or 24-hour time frame) video elements on Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger have grown 11 times faster than photo posts, tweets, or statuses—and in an extremely short amount of time.

What are stories? They’re short-term visual elements: 5-15 second videos or still images that are usually only live for 24 hours. Elements like these don’t have the longevity of standard posts, but they do allow users to share brief glimpses of their daily lives.

Stories marry visual cues and immediate gratification. That limited time frame makes the content instantly more valuable and more immediately necessary. It’s the 24-hour lifespan that makes the tool so powerful for individuals and businesses alike.

Shorter Life, Bigger Impact

Stories expire after 24 hours and cannot be accessed again unless they’re “pinned” (and even then, the option to do so doesn’t exist on all platforms). Because of this short lifespan, you can update your stories with greater frequency than you could a blog.

A blog that’s updated two to three times a day might overwhelm subscribers. Thanks to the digestibility and brevity of a visual format, stories can be processed and shared, quickly and easily.

The Additional Benefits of Stories

Integrating frequent use of social media stories into your content marketing campaign does more than just allow you to post content multiple times a day. When you use stories to your advantage, you can:

• Engage with your audience on a near-constant basis
• Direct greater numbers of consumers to your platform
• Reach out to a younger demographic to attract more consumer attention as well as active influencers
• Reduce your marketing budget thanks to social media’s free editing tools

Story Tips and Tricks

If there are so many advantages to the practice of using stories, how should you best make use of the medium?

• Geotags and locations: Make sure that whenever you create a story, you take advantage of your locale’s geotag. Likewise, find a hashtag that marks your location and use it liberally. Doing so will serve as a form of local SEO, and it can increase the likelihood that your business will appear in localized Google searches.
• Poll: Create fun, serious, or generalized polls for your audience to participate in so you can better engage their interaction with your platform. Not only will you be able to gather data about the number of consumers’ attention you have, but you’ll also be able to receive immediate feedback on a product or development.
• Improved backlinking: You can also use stories to direct consumer audiences to your platform’s home page or other social media platforms. This inter-platform linking creates a stronger link network for your business overall. While internal linking doesn’t contribute as significantly to your SERP ranking as external linking does, the network you create will serve your SERP ranking well in the long run.

Stories enable you to better connect with your audience, but their value goes beyond connections. These social media snapshots also allow you to gauge target reactions to your business model and marketing efforts. Use them to connect, react, and tailor your company to better meet consumer needs in the future.

Conclusion

Is your company in need of help? MV3 Marketing Agency has numerous Marketing experts ready to assist you. Contact MV3 Marketing to jump-start your business.

image attribution: leungchopan – stock.adobe.com