7 Examples of Social Media Storytelling Done Right
This is the year 2021, and if you still don’t have social media in your brand strategy, you are lacking uncountable opportunities to sell, apart from losing potential customers to the competition.
With more than 3.78 billion active users – which is around 50% population of the planet – social media stands as the biggest place to connect with your audience and market your brands.
Here, Facebook is still the largest platform with over 2.32 billion monthly active users. To understand its significance, 68% of US adults report that they use Facebook.
On average, people spend 2.5 hours per day scrolling through their timelines on different social networks.
Convinced by these trends, 73% of marketers believe that they are making somewhat effective use of social media. But, the way social media works and leverages has changed a lot in recent years.
If social is a part of your marketing strategies, but it is not yielding, it is time to shift your approach for better reach, engagement, and conversion.
Social media success is not as simple as it seems. You cannot win a million followers within a week or month, of course, until you have a celebrity ambassador or influencer on your side. Your triumph on social media depends mainly on the quality of content you share and that, the quality of product or service you offer.
If done right, your social media content strategy will help you strengthen your bond with existing customers and give you a chance to build new customers too.
Getting new customers relies on what they find while researching about your brand. If your stories and the stories about your brand told by existing customers influence them, they are your customers already.
There are many ways you can tell your stories to your audience on social media. These include timeline updates with links, videos, images, and infographics. All you have to do is to work on stories with potential!
Storytelling!
Instagram Stories alone is a highly powerful way for storytelling. Over 500 million people use Instagram Stories daily. Whoa!
Not sure how to tell stories on social media? Here are perfect examples of how to use stories on Instagram to connect, resonate, engage, and convince their audience.
Each social network has its own Instagram Stories-like feature. On WhatsApp, it’s called Status, Twitter calls it Fleet, and on Facebook and Snapchat too, it is labelled as Story. LinkedIn and YouTube have similar features, which allow users to share real-life stories using images and videos.
Stories on almost all social networks disappear after 24 hours. So, what’s the point of using it? Why do some of the top businesses use stories anyway?
Stories offer better reach, engagement than timeline updates. Users see the stories feed at the top of their timeline. Social networks send their users notifications about stories added by their friends and brand pages they follow. If a user taps on the notification, he/she will land directly on the story you posted.
Stories are an easy tool for brands to build connections and relations with their audience more effectively and engagingly. Stories engage multiple parts of the human brain.
For your stories to work, you will need to research your audience, which will essentially include understanding their likes, dislike, and browsing and buying trends. Stories built on these metrics not only are relevant and engaging but also have an impact on the brain and thought process of the target audience.
Stories have the potential to boost traffic to your website. However, for that, you will need to focus on the quality of content you share. Stories encourage your users to come back for more, giving you a chance to engage and convert again!
Here are 7 examples of how brands are using storytelling for their brands:
1. Google
What is “Good” about Google? It aims to ease the life of its users. Let’s take an example from its #YearInSearch hashtag campaign. Google ran this campaign to show what people searched for most in 2018.
The tone and purpose of this campaign were to act like a human and above that, a motivator for the users.
2. Gillette
As a business, you don’t always have to sell. This might build a negative reputation for your brand. This creates an impression that you are always interested in selling!
See how Gillette, one of the leading men’s grooming brands, tells stories to encourage its audience.
3. Apple
There is no better example of engaging with users! Apple Inc. ran a hashtag campaign #ShotoniPhone, an approach to encourage users to share beautiful pictures they took from their iPhones.
Despite being a brand-centric campaign, Apple showcases user-generated images and videos with this hashtag on their timeline updates, which draws massive engagement and conversion.
4. Always
#LikeAGirl has always been a negative remark which disparages that women are inferior to men. But Always turned this adage into a positive and powerful remark to support women empowerment with this campaign.
5. Renault
The automobile biggie Renault launched an ad story on the 30th anniversary of its brand Clio. It was a love story of two women, seeing each other after their childhood years, and about the hardships, they faced in society, and also about how the culture has evolved ever since the launch of the car.
6. Disneyland
No one tells stories better than Disney does! We all had a dream to visit Disneyland when we were a child, and we still do. Because some dreams never get old!
Disneyland ad stories give us nostalgia with their strong emotional connection.
7. Philips
Philips celebrates heroes that make life better. Their products ease and better our life. This campaign was dedicated to healthcare workers who risked their lives to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of COVID patients.
Everything around us is a story. Take inspiration from those stories, craft them using the word with a powerful emotional connect, and share it with the relevant audience. Just focus on these three aspects, and you will be surprised by the results!
