What is a Facebook Story?
Facebook Stories is a feature wherein users can upload and share visuals (pictures, videos, animations, and polls), along with text posts; but these are only visible for a period of 24 hours.
Facebook Stories are placed right at the top of the user’s News Feed, both on the app and through the computer. This means that businesses have an extraordinary chance to capture the attention of people and to advertise their products and services.
Stories can additionally be viewed and shared through the Facebook Messenger application. On Facebook or Messenger, people can tap on a profile’s circular icon in the space allocated for stories to watch them.
They are capable of responding to narratives or conversing with personal communication.
Why Should Businesses Use Facebook Stories?
Facebook’s 2018 transformation, expected to bring about “significant conversations,” made life difficult for businesses, as posts from friends and relatives were favored more than content from companies.
Due to the alteration of the algorithm, companies have experienced a decrease in their organic coverage and involvement. When considering the situation, it’s especially significant to take advantage of options such as stories, where businesses can offer amusing and genuine moments and display their message imaginatively. That’s where Facebook Stories come in.
Here are some significant benefits of using Facebook Stories for businesses :
Increase Exposure
Stories take up the most important part of someone’s feed and help to bring attention to your brand by making it more visually visible.
They give you the opportunity to demonstrate your business and items from an alternate perspective and utilize instruments that urge collaboration from customers. This leads to a better understanding and a solid fan base for your business, resulting in a positive outcome.
If your firm has already started utilizing Instagram Stories, you can post the identical material on Facebook Stories as well—this will serve to raise awareness with minimal extra work.
Enhance Your Brand Personality
With Facebook Stories, you can create content that is tailored to your audience and showcase the personal elements of your business.
They also let you be a bit more relaxed in how you converse. You can advertise your products/services subtly in such a way that it does not appear to be a forced exchange. Producing material based on the latest news, conducting enjoyable polls and answers and questions – stories are a great way to demonstrate your company’s distinct personality and make lasting interactions with your customers.
Build More Trust Through Transparency
Investigate possibilities such as employee appearances, behind-the-curtain access, and instructional films for Facebook Stories to help people comprehend your business better.
Content that is genuine and frank like this also helps to engender confidence in your brand as people can view the genuine part of it and what is happening out of the public eye.
How Long Do Facebook Stories Last?
The visibility of a narrative is limited to a 24-hour time period for viewers. Concerning the duration of each Facebook Story, photographs can be viewed for 5 seconds while clips with a maximum length of 20 seconds can be featured.
Images advertising on Facebook Stories will be displayed for 5 seconds, and video ads will show for 15 seconds or less. If the video ad goes on for more than the allotted time, it will be presented in the form of story cards by Facebook, with viewers having to click on the “Keep Watching” button to see all the slides.
Facebook Story Highlights
Once laughed at for cloning Snapchat, Facebook made itself stand apart from the platform by presenting Highlights. By using Facebook Story Highlights, you can make your Stories stay for more than 24 hours, allowing you and your viewers to view them at any time.
A horizontal scroll bar on your profile displays special moments and tales and lets you put them in folders with titles and pictures for the covers.
They provide the impression of a photo album, and every main point can help you express a part of your brand’s narrative.
You have the power to use highlight boxes to inform people about your brand’s laws and regulations, give insight on your product/service, and feature positive customer reviews. You have lots of chances to make it work.
Facebook Story Archive
You are now aware that the pages of stories that you make and distribute will only last for 24 hours. You can also keep and view them for an extended period of time using the Facebook Story Archive function.
Essentially, the archive is a collection of all the stories you posted on Facebook in the past—except if you manually deleted them within 24 hours.
This characteristic gives you the opportunity to not simply look back on your past stories, but also to reuse and republish them. You can include old tales from the repository in your highlights to ensure they are always visible on your profile.
Tips on How to Use Facebook Stories for Business
Facebook Stories for businesses is pretty straightforward to use. The only method is to make them brief, attractive, and stimulating and comprehend the material your viewers enjoy.
Also, don’t forget to keep these basics in mind:
Use Vertical Videos
A huge number of people access Facebook Stories through their cell phones, though they can also be seen on computers and other mobile devices. Studies have indicated that the vast majority of people utilize their phones in a vertical orientation rather than a horizontal one. This is exactly why Facebook stories are specifically designed for full-screen, vertical viewing.
Therefore, it’s advisable to record and upload vertical videos (9:16) so that viewers can watch and appreciate your stories without difficulty.
Ensure Your Video is in the Optimal Video Resolution And Size for Facebook Stories
It’s suggested that the size of photos for posting on Facebook Stories meet the specific dimensions of each platform and its offerings.
Facebook Stories must have a resolution of at least 1080 x 1080 pixels for both images and videos to make sure that the whole screen of a cellphone can be used. It is suggested to use an aspect ratio of 9:16, although ratios varying from 1.91:1 to 9:16 are accepted.
Leave a margin of 250 pixels at the top and bottom of your story which will be covered by the brand’s profile photo and call-to-action button. This should be 14% of your story’s total size.
What to post on Facebook Stories
An essential factor for achieving success on Facebook Stories is understanding what content to share. What type of material would work best within this format, and what do your viewers want to see? Check out some of these ideas on what you should post to your Facebook Stories:
1: Make important announcements
Your Facebook Stories are a great way to give people a preview of an upcoming product, as well as inform them of a new feature. This is a great channel to communicate significant announcements. You might want to publicize your most up-to-date transactions and special offers, as well as any other significant info that you don’t want your followers to overlook.
You could even take advantage of this capability to let people know about your recent blog entries or YouTube clips and increase content viewership. This is Penguin Random House’s way of pushing their readers to check out the thriller and mystery books that were chosen by their readers.
2: Take your followers behind the scenes
Content that is shown for only 24 hours can be uploaded to Facebook stories, which is the ideal place for this quick and temporary type of content, such as photographs of what is happening behind the scenes. You could display your manufacturing procedure, your employees concentrating or enjoying themselves, the progression of your event, and other things. Provide your audience with an unaltered view of your company to create reliability and reveal you’re true character.
3: Drive engagement with interactive content
Facebook Stories have a variety of tools that make it possible for followers to communicate with you. You could put up stickers that ask your followers to make a decision between two things, provide a score for something, or answer certain queries. This is a great opportunity to build relationships with your followers and get to know their tastes, so use it to your advantage.
PopSugar inquired their viewers to reveal their preferred films dependent on various atmospheres.
4: Share useful tips and tricks
You can also use Facebook Stories to provide a brief overview of valuable advice and techniques your viewers will appreciate. Take advantage of this chance to attach a link to the whole article or video so they can get an extensive tutorial. You don’t always need to link to another piece of content; you can also provide simple advice.
5: Shine the spotlight on your customers
The perfect way to express gratitude for your customers without overcrowding your page on Facebook is to share it through Stories. Share the experiences, images, and advice of your supporters with your network to demonstrate how much admiration you have for them. This will also make your customers feel valued, which in turn increases their loyalty to your company.
GoPro utilizes a dual tactic by not only disseminating images and clips from its users, but also by effectively furnishing directions on utilizing its merchandise, both of which are shown below.
Best practices for using Facebook Stories
Understanding what type of material to post on your Facebook Stories is necessary, yet if you truly want to captivate your audience, precise implementation is key. Thus, it is essential to comprehend the top techniques for using Facebook Stories and creating the perfect material to captivate your target audience. Here’s what you need to do:
1: Jazz up your Stories using filters and creative tools
Facebook Stories provides many filters and inventive tools to construct attraction-grabbing material. Besides the amusing facial filters, you can also place stickers to do surveys, identify other people, label your position, incorporate music, include GIFs, and so on. Take advantage of these possibilities to give your Stories a lift, making your material more entertaining and visually appealing to the people who follow you.
An instance of this is Refinery29 using the query sticker to foster response and involvement. They have included additional writing and a #stayhome label to give the post a more cheerful tone.
2: Create original graphics that pop
Posting authentic pictures and videos on your Facebook Stories is an effective way to appear genuine to your followers, though it could interfere with your branding objectives. You don’t want your patrons to overlook your firm’s trademark tones and designs since all they have been watching are your informal Stories.
In conclusion, it is important to focus on reinforcing your brand identity even when using Facebook Stories so that people will acknowledge your brand whenever they encounter it. That’s where original graphics enter the picture. This permits you to add some of the polished aspect and graphics you are looking to relate to your brand into your Stories so you can still interestingly involve your viewers.
You can employ unique visuals to keep people informed and announce something of import, put forward citations, and do more. Be certain to adhere to a consistent style guide in order to sustain uniformity and promote your branding endeavors. This would entail utilizing a particular selection of typefaces and color schemes that you would like to link with your brand.
Even though you don’t possess a dedicated designer within your business to produce unique visuals for your Facebook Stories, you can always take advantage of programs such as Canva to craft them by yourself. The tool is simple to use and provides many templates for social media updates and Posts, letting you tailor them to your company’s style manual.
3: Add custom links to drive traffic and leads
Facebook Stories offers the benefit of sharing personalized links if your page has greater than 10,000 followers. This is ideal for increasing visitor numbers and generating potential customers for your website. People who have fewer than 10,000 followers can only use the link provided in their page’s contact details to embed it onto their page.
You can use personalized links in your Stories to take people to certain web pages on your website. For example, you can point your followers to a new blog post, video, or product page that is related. You could advertise a no-risk trial period for something in your Facebook Stories and send the viewers to a web page where they can register for the free trial.
You could utilize this even more by adapting your links with UTM markers to estimate their success. This will enable you to monitor how much web traffic you achieved from Facebook Stories if the timing of posts had any effect, which styles generated more traffic, if the CTA had a significant influence, etc.
Final thoughts
That wraps it up – this guide will help you take advantage of Facebook Stories to optimize the promotion of your business and material. Tales have many facets like inventive instruments and custom linking capabilities that can truly aid in your promotional activities. Take advantage of this opportunity to enhance various aspects of your business.
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