Stories Are the New Social Media Newsfeed

The social channels we use are less important now than ever before. Today, it’s all about how you tell your story.

Takeaways

• Carefully choosing your social channels no longer has the impact it once had on your marketing success.
• Many of the new feature roll-outs on top social platforms have focused on storytelling.
• Forget about reaching your daily quota of posts, and focus more on the stories you share.

Lauren: The social media channels we use are actually less important now than ever before. Right now, it’s all about how you tell your story.

Hi, I’m Lauren Teague, Strategist at Convince & Convert, and today I want to explore the idea that stories are becoming the new newsfeed of social media. Think about all the social networks we are using. In the first decade of social media, we’ve put a ton of emphasis on being on the right social network or the hot new app, but today we have too many options, and channel selection does not guarantee success. It’s less about what social network you use to reach your customers. What is important today is how you tell a story.

Snapchat changed the game when it evolved from a messaging app to a storytelling platform. The best original Snapchatters were the ones who used stories creatively in the ways that the rest of us couldn’t imagine, until we saw what these creators were doing, and we started to copy them. But we aren’t the only ones copying Snapchat. In just the last few months, stories like we see in Snapchat have become a feature, not a destination. Now stories are integrated as part of Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and even on Clips by Apple and Medium’s Series. Stories are becoming the new newsfeed of social media, and you can’t avoid stories because your customers aren’t using Snapchat.

You see, hundreds of millions of people are being trained every day by their friends and their favorite big brands to consume stories across multiple social networks and content sites. So when we think about how to make content for social media, we need to be thinking in stories, and not in posts.

There are three things I’m gonna share that are essential to producing good stories. The first is that the videos and the photos we’re using are primarily vertical. It’s natural in our smartphone world, even though for years, videographers had been yelling at us to hold our phone sideways, right? Well, now you don’t have to. But you do need narration that is chronological in your stories. It’s even more important now to tell a story from beginning to end with the essential elements of narration. And finally, all of that visual content we are capturing is overlaid with text, filters, stickers, effects, emoji, and whatever the platform has to offer. Don’t underestimate the impact of using these things that help to narrate a story, create connections with your audience, and ultimately, get them to react or respond in the way you ask them to.

I challenge you to get out of your news feed habits for one week. Instead of scrolling down through a timeline, instead, tap to view the stories on Instagram or Facebook or on Snapchat. Start to identify what you like and what you don’t about how stories are presented, and begin to mimic the things that you see. And then, I’d like to know if you agree with me. Are stories replacing the news feed for you and for your audience? Answer me below or anywhere on social media, and we’ll keep chatting about this. Thanks for watching, and I hope to see you soon.

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