Is your brand more active on social media, but you still don’t quite understand how to work Facebook and Instagram stories into your strategy?
Stories are a unique social media feature that many creators struggle with. Many people use them to promote their latest Facebook and Instagram posts, which is fine, but there is so much more you can do with this feature.
In this post, we share tips on how to use stories to humanize your blog’s brand.
1. Understand what Facebook and Instagram stories are
Facebook and Instagram Stories are temporary posts that only appear on social media for 24 hours.
After that, they are automatically deleted, but creator pages have the option to add individual stories to highlight collections so their followers can view them whenever they want.
Facebook and Instagram are both owned by the same company, Meta, so even though these platforms are completely different, they work more or less the same way.
Here are the specs for Stories on both platforms:
- Pictures
- The maximum processing time is five seconds on Facebook and six seconds on Instagram
- Maximum file size 30 MB
- JPEG and PNG image formats are supported
- Videos
- The maximum operating time is 15 seconds
- Maximum file size is 4 GB
- MP4 and MOV video formats are supported
You can add stickers and text overlays to stories, but subtitles are not supported. They must be added to videos before you can add them to stories.
Instagram supports 9:16 and 4:5 to 1.91:1 aspect ratios for both image- and video-based stories, but Facebook only supports 9:16 to 1.91:1 for image-based stories.
If you want to keep things simple, the photos and videos you take on your smartphone must be natively supported by Facebook and Instagram.
Where do stories appear?
On Facebook, stories appear above your follower’s news feed.
Stories will only appear for accounts the user follows.
This is what makes stories so valuable to marketing. Your audience may really want to keep up with your blog on social media, but your posts are drowned out by all the noise in their feed.
After all, aside from the YouTube Subscriptions page, there are hardly any social media platforms left with chronologically key feeds.
Now everything is based on algorithmsthus, one user’s feed looks completely different from another user’s feed because it is based on the content that each user has interacted with in the past.
But the stories are different. As long as your audience continues to view your stories, your stories will always appear at the top of the list. This is pretty powerful in the wild world of marketing.
Instagram Stories are the same. They appear above your viewer’s feed.
If users view your Facebook page or Instagram profile, they can click on your profile picture to view your latest stories.
A ring around your profile picture will glow when a new story is available: blue on Facebook and orange/pink on Instagram.
2. Understand how creators use Facebook and Instagram stories
Creators use stories in a variety of ways.
First, they use them in the way we already mentioned: they Share your latest posts on Facebook and Instagram to their stories.
All the user has to do is click on the post link in the story to be taken to it.
This is a decent way to promote your latest social media posts, but it’s not the best strategy to use as your audience may have seen these posts naturally in their feed or by visiting your page directly.
Other ways creators use stories on social media include:
- Quick updates on upcoming content
- Teasers for upcoming content
- Short vlogs
- Share photos you don’t want to include in official posts
- Affiliate marketing and sponsored posts
- Share other users’ posts
3. Create original social media content
If you want to be successful on social media as a blogger, you need to understand how internet users use social media.
Most bloggers make the mistake of using social media content promotion strategy for their blog. And nothing else.
They will only share links to their most recent posts where links are allowed. Even worse, they’ll make videos that demonstrate a small part of the solution to the problem, then end the video with a call to action like “learn more on my website. Link in bio.”
What most bloggers don’t realize is that social media users want to stay on social media. They don’t want to go to your website to find out what you should include in your video.
In fact, your social media content should be an extension of your brand, not an extension of your blog.
This means that creating original social media content.
You should create social media content that can be completely consumed in one post in particular. If you’re trying to teach your audience something, put it all into one video.
However, he does it is acceptable to split some things into several videos.
Anyway, before I continue, I wanted to emphasize the importance of bloggers creating original social media content. If you are already used to creating original social media content, it will be easier for you to figure out what content to include in stories.
Note: This doesn’t mean you should never link back to your blog or include CTAs in your videos/content. You absolutely must. But this type of content should be a smaller portion of the overall content you post on social media. It’s also worth noting that text-based content with links usually performs poorly. This is because social networks naturally want to keep their users on their platforms.
4. Share adventures in short vlogs
When your follower views one of your stories on Facebook or Instagram, the app will automatically play the next available story.
Keep this little feature in mind when creating stories.
For example, if you’re doing something related to your niche, take your audience on a journey by making short video clips and snapping pictures along the adventure.
Remember, stories can only be up to 15 seconds. Any clips longer than this must be uploaded as reels.
When you’re done, load the images and clips in the order that makes sense for them to appear. Your viewers will be able to watch the first story, then each subsequent story will play automatically.
5. Share interesting moments with short clips and pictures
Anytime you do something related to your niche or brand, you will experience exciting or interesting moments every now and then.
When these things happen, take out your smartphone and record them with videos and pictures.
If they are too interesting or interesting, save them for official posts and reels.
If not, share them as a story.
6. Share other users’ posts
Big brands are known for being faceless and non-inclusive. Heck, some marketers will even teach you not to link to competitors so that you don’t pass link equity to pages that are superior to you.
Social media is different.
If your audience buys and likes your competitor’s content in their feed, the algorithm will recommend your content to them as well.
You can really do a lot to humanize your brand by shouting out and supporting other creators in your niche.
Your audience will respect the positive vibes it gives to the world, and your competitors may even shout at you.
You can also do this with user-generated content.
User-generated content (UGC) is content about or inspired by your brand.
So if you see a video or photo of a user that is related to your brand in some way, share it on your story.
It can even convince other users to create their own UGC.
7. Connect with your audience through stories
The best way to humanize your brand is to connect with your audience as much as possible.
You can do this by replying to their comments and liking their comments. TikTok even lets you reply to comments with videos.
But you can also use stories, especially Instagram Stories, to create interesting posts.
Use stickers to poll your audience and ask them questions.
You can even use Instagram stories to host a Q&A.
8. Incorporate stories into your marketing strategy
Once you start creating native social media, you’ll have multiple content channels to manage: one for your blog and one for each social media platform you post to.
If you have a podcast, Patreon, and YouTube channel, consider them individual content channels as well.
Facebook and Instagram stories are more casual than mainstream content channels, but you can still find strategic ways to work them into your overall marketing strategy.
For starters, if you’re publishing a blog post soon, here are a few story ideas that can promote your post.
For example, if you’re in the guitar niche and your post is a review for a new acoustic guitar, use stories to showcase things you can’t include in your article, such as a series of stories of you testing the guitar in different ways, the quality of the guitar’s packaging, and a short video showcasing what’s in the box.
Planning stories
If you’re going to work stories into your marketing strategy, you can plan them.
You can easily do this with a social media planner as They went viral. They even have a free plan!
It won’t let you add stickers and other overlays to your stories, but it does offer an easy way to schedule your stories in advance. You can also schedule other types of content in advance, monitor analytics, and more.
Final thoughts
Facebook and Instagram Stories are a great opportunity to get more visibility on social media.
But they’re not just for promoting your latest blog posts. You can do more with them.
You can use them to share original content, adventures, exciting moments and connect with your audience.
And if you find them time consuming. Consider creating content for them in batches and scheduling them in advance They went viral.
While you won’t be able to add stickers or links when planning stories, you can save a lot of time.
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