Chapter 4: Social Media is King
Social media stories can be hit or miss when it comes to actually impacting your account performance. That being said, they are a fantastic way to make sure that you occupy as much space in the minds of your customers as possible. People will often open Instagram and click a story from one of their friends, then just proceed down the list. If you can have your stories appear in the list, the extra touchpoint is worth it even if they don’t engage with the story at all.
You definitely don’t want to flood your stories with too many posts, as people will often just swipe away if they can see they have 10+ stories to get through from your page. As a general rule of thumb, I think it’s a good idea to always have at least one story up on your account. Stories stay active for 24 hours after posting, so putting something up once a day should suffice. So what should you add to your stories?
Adding account feed posts to stories: The easiest way to post stories is to simply repost any main feed post that you put up. On Instagram, this is super easy and will also provide a direct link to the post, allowing users who may have missed your post in their feed a chance to check it out. If you post once a day, then this pretty much solves your story posting obligation.
Real life videos or BTS: Stories are meant to be personal, and thus create a perfect opportunity for you to directly interact with your customers or show “in the moment” behind-the-scenes content. Simply pull out your phone when you’re walking around your factory or when you’re working on a new product and let people know how things are going.
Polls & animations: Stories have a ton of engagement options, from being able to ask followers questions, have them vote in polls, or rate the attractiveness of different posts. Sometimes these polls can provide helpful customer feedback (if you’re actually looking for legit feedback). Other times, they’re just a good engagement booster for your account. One way to optimize these stories is to create graphically interesting images or animations using Canva or the mobile app Mojo. Let’s take a look as to how these platforms help in story creation: