Using Facebook Stories for Marketing Campaigns

Stories – this content format is everywhere across the social media world today! Facebook is yet another social media giant providing Facebook Stories feature for its users since 2017.

Facebook launched its ‘Stories’ feature for its app platforms on March 28, 2017. It was later available for Facebook web as well.

Quick Links

1. How to Create Facebook Stories?

2. Why Do Brands Use Facebook Stories?

3. How to Take Advantage of Facebook Stories?

4. How to Create a Facebook Stories Strategy for Your Business?

5. How to Measure Success After Posting Facebook Stories for Brands?

Like stories feature on every other social media platform, Facebook Stories runs on the same concept of 24-hour disappearing visual updates. You can create stories from text, music, photos, polls, videos, animations and share them via the Facebook app or Facebook web.

Your stories will appear in your audiences’ feed and the designated stories row at the top of your Facebook page. 

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How to Create Facebook Stories?

Facebook stories provide many features, including text, filters, and stickers. You can also set location-specific tags to unique images for boosting engagement. For creating and sharing a story:

• Click Create a story at the top row of your News Feed
• Record a video by holding the round button or Click Create a photo story to add a photo or video from your device storage
• Next, you can tap the audience selector to choose the privacy as to who can view your story
• Click Share to story

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Why Do Brands Use Facebook Stories?

Facebook reports that around 2.14 billion people are reachable with ads on its platform. And people pay attention and engage with Facebook ads as, on average, users click on 12 ads per month.

The story format on Facebook is quite lucrative- it gets audiences’ attention owing to the above numbers. Facebook stories bring mini-narratives for the people and can tremendously strengthen a brand’s relationships with its audiences.

So, what else about stories that makes them so relevant in marketing?

1 . Prime Real Estate

Facebook has made it easy for your Stories to get found as soon as people open their app or log in on the Facebook web. Facebook Stories appear right at the top of the Facebook page, which makes it the first thing your prospects see on Facebook, ideally. 

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Stories let you place your content front and center, making it an incredible attention grabber and means more engagement from the audience. 

2. Rising Stories Use

Snapchat introduced the Stories format of content to the world in 2013, and since then, it is a continuous rise in popularity. 

Stories have gained popularity on other social media sites and help connect with the viewers on a more personal level. As a result, more people turn to stories to communicate with their audience or viewers in a natural and immediate way. 

Facebook has almost 1.85 billion daily active users, and every day about 500 million users use Facebook Stories.

That is quite incredible as it means nearly a fourth of Facebook’s daily active users either post or engage with Stories daily. 

3. Better Connections

Using videos in Facebook Stories is a popular way for brands to promote or inform the audience because it eliminates the iffy element and grabs the audience’s attention. That is what a marketer needs. 

Facebook stories provide you with a forum to communicate with your customers while explaining what differentiates you from other brands in an easy-to-consume style. You will show what happens in your business and introduce the people involved in your company to your viewers. 

4. Measure your Campaigns Easily

When it comes to targeting and analytics, Facebook is fantastic. You can keep track of who views your stories, which makes it much easier to target.

When you know who is viewing your stories, you can get a deeper understanding of your social media campaigns and fine-tune your targeting efforts that would ultimately improve results.

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How to Take Advantage of Facebook Stories?

Facebook stories enable you to make use of the most necessary form of social media communication: Storytelling. Storytelling is a creative aspect that helps businesses engage the audience by telling more about brands and products, building credibility by providing easy-to-digest content. 

So, how can you get the best out of Facebook stories?

1 . Create Exciting Time-Sensitive Content

Stories are compelling and exciting because of the short-lived aspect associated with them, most social media users will agree. They are temporary and disappear after 24 hours. 

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So, it is essential to make sure that the content you share with your audience on Stories should be time-sensitive. Meaning, don’t post something that is an evergreen form of content and avoid duplicating your stories week-on-week because that will ultimately cut off your audience’s excitement and engagement. 

2 . Be Unique

Remove the barrier of boredom by avoiding posting the same content across different social media platforms. While posting some duplicate content (but your own) is fine, it eventually gets boring. That is where creating unique content comes into the picture.

Almost 51% of Facebook users say they simply unfollow brands if they post irritating content and 27% say they flag the brand or page as spam or report and block it.

So, before creating content for stories, keep in mind to be unique and question yourself, who cares?

3. Be Brand Focused

You are making an effort to position your brand and stay on top of minds. So, keeping your stories brand focussed should actually be a vital part of your social media campaigns. You can do this by utilizing features available on Facebook stories, such as filters and effects. 

• Use those filters that you think are relevant to your brand
• Incorporate those themes that you think will suit the promotions you are running
• Utilize consistent color or text styles that blend well with your brand image

4. Focus on More Than Promotion

If you want to keep your audience delighted and engaged, then keep away from just posting promotional content for them. Instead, also try to create insider content for them besides product focussed posts. Discover new ways to delight your audience, like let them have a chance to know about the people behind your brand or business.

5. Track the Performance of Your Stories

Monitor the performance of your stories and discover where your stories have the most significant impact or engagement. Doing this will give you a better idea to optimize your strategy and create more targeted content.

When you know what kind of people are watching your content,  you know who’s interested in your brand.

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How to Create a Facebook Stories Strategy for Your Business

With an increasing number of users adopting Facebook Stories, it’s essential to develop a strategy that focuses on specific goals such as increasing interaction or gaining more followers.

1 . What to Post to Facebook Stories?

It is best to create and share unique content via Facebook Stories because it will raise excitement levels and attract more and more engagement from your audience. 

2. How Often to Post to Facebook Stories?

Obviously, there is no hard and fast rule as to how often you should post Facebook Stories — it solely depends on your goals and what your followers find interesting in your stories. 

Whatever your goals are, try not to flood in posting dozens of stories a day. Instead, post a few times a week or in a limited number a day.

3. When to Post to Facebook Stories?

Facebook Stories are available for your audience to view for 24 hours — giving you an excellent long window of being present on your followers’ stories row. That means your story gets viewed by maximum people during that 24 hours time frame.

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So, it is better not to stress out about posting your Facebook Stories based on optimal times. Once you start posting regularly on Facebook Stories, you’ll register better engagement and can therefore plan your content calendar based on that analytics.

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How to Measure Success After Posting Facebook Stories for Brands?

You can measure your Facebook Stories’ effectiveness and analyze how it performs because that is what determines the success of your social media strategy.

For doing this, you must track unique story opens, forward taps, backward taps, forward swipes, and exits.

Now what are these terms as far as Facebook is concerned? 

1. Unique Story Opens

It represents the number of people who actually open your story. So, when this number is higher, it means an engagement spike.

2. Forward Taps

Forward taps refer to the number of times a user tapped to skip to your story’s next slide. 

3. Backward Taps

Backward taps represent the number of times a user tapped to go back to your story. That means your story caught attention to prompt the user to view it again.

4. Forward Swipes

Forward Swipes refers to the number of times a user swiped to skip to the next story in their feed. That points to the dis-interest of users, and you hope this number is not high.

5. Exits

Exits are quite straightforward as it represents the number of users who viewed your story and then exited the Stories feature to arrive at their regular newsfeed page.

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To sum up

To sum up, when it comes down to determining how often to post on Facebook Stories, there is no magic number. But keeping your content relevant and fresh and sharing it following a consistent style is the key to success.