Social media has become the modern town square where people can interact with friends, family, businesses, creators, and more. With billions of active users on various social media channels, companies with an active presence on social sites have a unique advantage over others—a wider reach.
Still, the social media space isn’t free from competition. To stand out and capture your audience share, you must be engaging. Fortunately, this is somewhat easy to achieve with the Story feature on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat.
Social media stories have become powerful tools for engaging audiences and driving interactions because they’re less curated and more relatable. Here, we look at how they can be great sources of business engagement and provide some tips for creating compelling content.
What are social media stories?
The Story feature originated on Snapchat. Now, you can find it on almost every platform—including its source (Snapchat) and Twitter—but it’s huge on Instagram and Facebook.
Social media stories allow you to publish a collection of photos or videos in sequence, similar to how a story is told in a book. You can incorporate text, video, GIFs, and links to truly make them unique and specific to your brand. Users can even share links on Instagram stories, which can help drive traffic to dedicated pages. Each story disappears after 24 hours, and followers can view and comment on it.
The beauty of social media stories is that anybody can leverage them; there are no restrictions. This is evident from Meta’s usage statistics—over half a billion people use Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp stories daily, with good reason. They’re a great way to engage your audience, especially if you want to feature behind-the-scenes action or promote exclusive content or giveaways.
Further, they’re extremely influential and inspire action—58% of U.S. adults Meta surveyed say they’ve browsed businesses’ websites for more information after viewing their stories. If audience growth and increased engagement are at the top of your social media goals, stories are some of your best tools.
How stories can increase your business engagement
How exactly can social media stories improve your engagement rates? Read on to find out:
Engaging your audience creatively
Who said you must post well-curated images and videos on social media platforms to capture your audience’s interest? Certainly not platforms with the Stories feature! You can get as creative as you want with your story content without worrying about altering the rest of your page’s aesthetic because it’s temporary.
Finding creative ways to engage can help you maintain your audience’s attention and boost engagement. Use your Stories feature as a dynamic tool to share visually appealing content you wouldn’t typically post to your feed, like live events, webinars, or new product launches.
Showcasing behind-the-scenes content
Modern consumers look for more than just great products when shopping. They also seek authenticity and transparency—70% of U.S. buyers report that authenticity instills stronger confidence.
How can you showcase your authenticity and build trust on social media networks? Stories. They allow you to humanize your brand and deepen audience connections with behind-the-scenes content. You can show what goes into making your products, share your day-to-day tasks, give a tour of your business premises, or bring the people behind your brand in front of the camera through employee interviews.
Overcoming algorithm limitations
Let’s be honest—social media rankings aren’t the easiest to navigate, more so when it comes to traditional posts like feed posts. Your content may get lost in the clutter, affecting your visibility.
Stories can help you remain visible to your target audience. Social media algorithms typically base their stories’ rankings on users’ engagement, viewing histories, and closeness with accounts. This means that as long as you constantly post engaging content on your Stories, algorithms will rank you favorably.
Maintaining a clean post feed
Stories are your greatest ally if you want to share a lot of content with your audience without cluttering your main feed. Unlike feed posts, which can last a lifetime, stories expire after 24 hours, providing a fresh canvas every day.
You can use the Stories feature for content that may not be a great fit for your feed, like behind-the-scenes looks or live events, and the feed for posts that align with your brand aesthetics. This way, you get to promote real-time engagement while still maintaining your page’s overall image.
Creating a dedicated engagement channel
Looking for a way to engage with your audience more directly? Make stories a unique channel for interactive content like quizzes and polls. This way, you can learn more about your audience, and they can discover more about you, all without affecting your main feed’s aesthetics.
How to improve your social media stories
Stories are a great avenue to promote brand awareness, enhance your social media presence, and increase engagement. However, your level of success with this feature depends on the types of content you post, how often you post, and how you interact with your audience. Here are some tips to maximize your success:
Get your tone of voice right
Before you do anything, you need to figure out what sort of story you want to tell and make sure that it is on brand and in line with your overall social media strategy. Think about the following: What feeling are you trying to convey? Is this something that people will be excited about? Or maybe it’s something they’ll find funny. Think about how you want your audience to feel, and then use that knowledge to help guide you in what type of images or video clips you should select for your story.
Take advantage of custom stickers and text
When it comes to social media, people like it when other accounts express their feelings and showcase what’s going on in their lives. Additionally, your audience wants to know what is happening internally or if there is any news on the horizon.
In short—make it personal. One way that you can achieve this is by using custom stickers or text. Create unique content that relates specifically to your brand, and then use it to enhance your story. Make sure to review stickers and text with your social media marketing team to ensure brand consistency in case there are dedicated social assets specifically used for stories.
Add an interactive poll
If you’re looking for something that will keep people engaged with your story, adding an interactive poll is a great way to do it. You can use polls to ask people what they think of something that just happened or simply ask them which one of two things they like better.
Don’t just ask questions; you can also use them to provide choices for your audience in the form of polls. If you’re looking to gauge customer sentiment or understand any pain points in your products or features, this is an easy feature you can apply to your data collection efforts.
Post to your Story on a schedule
Social platforms allow quite a considerable number of stories. For example, you can publish up to 100 posts on Instagram Stories—but one to seven posts is enough.
While it may be tempting to post all your stories at once (if you decide to make multiple posts), this may not be the best strategy. Staggering your posts throughout the day is a great way to keep your story fresh and relevant so that you can continue driving engagement. Stagger the content on a regular schedule so your audience knows exactly when to come back for more.
Teasing your next story event is also a great way to ensure people are always eager to see what comes next.
Engage with your audience
Your audience is your greatest asset on social media. So, use them. Ask for content ideas using features like Q&As and polls—who knows, they may inform you about social media trends you could have missed.
Also, respond to and engage with audience replies/comments to stories. This can foster good relationships with other social media users and provide some content inspiration.
When combined with engagement metrics, like views and shares, information from your audience can help you identify the types of content that resonate best with potential customers and inform future content marketing.
Use storytelling techniques
Odds are, you’ll have many repeat viewers when you keep your content engaging. So, sharing the same content every day won’t cut it. Change things up once in a while by telling your brand story as well as compelling narratives intended to keep your audience engaged and let them know more about you.
Follow the basics of storytelling—each story should have a clear beginning, middle, and end to keep viewers engaged throughout the story sequence. Also, consider your chosen platform’s typical story length when recording your videos to avoid getting cut off at critical points in your story. If you want to post a long story, carefully trim it according to your chosen site’s typical story length for seamless continuity.
Measure and adapt based on performance
The key to a successful digital marketing campaign is continuous improvement. Regularly assess audience feedback and engagement metrics and adapt your social media content based on your findings.
Leverage analytics tools like Bitly to track each story’s performance and identify what resonates with your audience. With Bitly Analytics, you can see the number of clicks the links you post to your Stories receive, as well as get an overview of your audience’s locations so you can create more targeted content for your main demographics.
For even deeper insights into your stories’ performance, leverage social media management tools. Fortunately, Bitly integrates with many social media management tools, including HubSpot, Hootsuite, and Buffer, so you can seamlessly compare content performance across platforms.
Unlock the full potential of your stories with Bitly
Stories are meant to give people an inside look at what’s going on behind the scenes of your brand. Make sure you do just that by taking advantage of all of the features that are available to you.
You can include Bitly links in your stories to make them stand out and drive followers to your custom page or website. Further, you can use Bitly to track the performance of these links and access valuable insights, like the number of link clicks and click locations, helping you understand which content drives the most engagement and gain deeper insights into your audience.
Sign up for Bitly today to elevate your story content and engagement through actionable performance insights.