While it may come as a surprise to some people, social media stories are a great way for marketers to attract the right audience for their brands. Stories were introduced by Instagram in August 2016, mimicking the 24-hour appearance formula of Snapchat.
The Stories feature has gained popularity among users and experienced 200 million daily users by April 2017. Interestingly enough, Instagram stories’ popularity soon surpassed its inspiration: Snapchat.
With 400 million daily users, Instagram stories now have twice as many users as Snapchat.
However, the stories feature is not only popular on Instagram. In just 14 months of its launch, Facebook Stories started getting 150 million daily users.
On top of that, surveys showed that Facebook stories grow 15 times faster than sharing on news feeds, which is just what marketers need to leverage.
However, we can’t say the same about every platform. Twitter’s ‘Fleet’, which was the platform’s Stories feature, did not work well, and Twitter ended up killing it off.
Below, we take a look at the scope of social media stories in marketing.
Why are Social Media Stories Pivotal for Social Media Marketing?
Social media stories aren’t exactly a novel concept. They have been around for about eight years now.
Although Snapchat was the pioneer, its intent wasn’t marketing. Meanwhile, other platforms have curated Stories in a way that they can be used particularly for marketing and advertising.
Compared to all other platforms, Instagram Stories are definitely a more impactful channel for customer engagement and response.
With multiple features like Q&As, polls, videos, and quizzes, there’s a lot brands can do to engage customers and drive traffic to their social media pages.
However, it’s also important to notice that Stories weren’t successful on every platform. For instance, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn adopted Stories in the ‘third wave’.
While Twitter has taken the feature away, LinkedIn is still going ahead with it. On the other hand, Pinterest has adopted a different approach, creating stories called ‘Idea Pins’ that remain on the user’s page even after 24 hours.
Paid Ads in Stories
Instagram also lets you run paid ads in Stories, and the feature seems to be doing pretty well. Here are some possible reasons for this:
- Aspect Ratio: Instagram’s landscape images and videos have been labeled a nuisance by many people. It’s hard to fit a lot of information in such limited space, and you end up cropping something from the sides. However, stories appear vertically, giving marketers more space to work with.
- Duration: The duration of a story ad is the same as that of a regular story. When a user sees an ad on their feed, they can simply scroll down that very second. However, experts noticed that users tend to watch the story ads for a longer time. If there’s a video, they’ll most likely end up watching the whole 15 seconds.
- Call to Action: Instagram lets users add a call to action at the bottom of the story. The viewer can simply swipe up, and they will either be taken to the brand’s feed, website, or DMs. With these three options, brands have more liberty of choosing where they want to direct their customers.
How Will Social Media Stories Evolve in the Future?
No one can deny the role of social media stories in e-marketing today. But will this trend hold up in the future? Emarketer thinks so. The experts at Emarketer forecast the addition of social commerce features to Stories in the coming month.
They also believe Stories will be more interactive since the video format is rising in popularity among the new generation. More importantly, the unique nature of Stories will help them stand out from other social media marketing strategies.
Influencer marketing is also expected to see a huge rise on certain platforms, especially TikTok. According to the Emarketer report discussed above, 68% of the survey respondents plan on using TikTok for influencer marketing in 2021 as compared to only 16% in 2019.
Meanwhile, the figure for Instagram influencer marketing went down from 97% to 93% in 2019 and 2021, respectively. We believe this decrease is due to the increased interest of marketers in TikTok.
Despite this drop, Instagram is still the leading platform for influencer marketing. In fact, many influencers are also offering ‘Story packages’ as per which they open the brand’s products on stories rather than posting about it on their news feeds.
How to Use Social Media Stories for Marketing?
Since social media stories seem to be the big thing in e-marketing now, brands should know how to utilize them properly. Here are some tips:
Be Relatable
If your brand is relatable and fun, customers will engage with you. That’s probably why Instagram seems to do better in terms of customer engagement since it’s more inclined towards visual content.
In fact, 68% of Instagram users interact with brands every day as compared to only 32% of Facebook users.
Brands can use stories to give their customers a reason to engage. For instance, if you’re releasing a new collection or product soon, give your customers sneak peeks through Stories or hold polls to get their feedback.
Add Links
The easiest way to get customers on your website is to add a link to your story. For instance, if you’re posting about a product, link to the page on your website where the customers can purchase it.
The swipe-through rate for Instagram stories is 15% to 25%, which is enough to make a few sales by simply posting a story.
If the URL is too big, use a tool like Goo.gl to shorten it.
Post at the Right Time
You might be posting interesting stories but still not getting views or responses. Why could that be? It’s possible you’re posting when your audience is inactive.
Instead, check your Analytics to see when your audience is most active and post most of your content during this time.
Later did a survey of 12 million posts to determine the right time for posting on Instagram.
Conclusion
To sum up, social media stories are an important component of marketing today, and we expect the trend will continue growing in the future. As a brand, if you aren’t yet on the bandwagon, it’s about time since you’re losing customers by not leveraging Stories.
