14 Oct The Art of Storytelling Through Social Media
By: Julie Goode
Storytelling has a crucial role in marketing your business. It allows you to connect with your audience while also ascertaining your brand’s sole purpose. Keep reading for some guidance on how you can use social media to tell your brand’s story and how you can relate to your customers.
Developing your brand’s story:
The first step in storytelling through social media should always be to develop your brand’s story. Your story should inspire or create an emotional impact on your audience. When designing your story, we guide you to think of a few questions: Why did you start your business? How did you get to where you are now? How are you trying to provide an impact on the community? From there you should be able to draft what message you are trying to convey to your audience.
How to connect with the right audience:
To understand what storytelling methods will appeal to your customers, it is important to pay attention to their interests or values. The best way to understand your audience is to build interpersonal relationships with them, in-person or via telephone versus social media. This will help you learn what type of storytelling will appeal to your customers. This also benefits you by building a sense of community around your business.
Becoming a part of the community:
Storytelling through social media is a more in-depth post strategy. You’re sharing emotional, heartfelt posts versus a blast for a sale. As you plan out your storytelling approach, make sure you are creating content that is relevant to each platform. Involve your audience in posts and make them feel a part of the story by sharing testimonials or sharing how your customers inspire you.
Using visual appeal to tell your story:
You can be a storyteller through visually appealing photos. People are likely to engage and interact with accounts if posts attract a person’s eyes. This is particularly vital on platforms like Instagram because it is a platform based on photography and art. It is also important to discover your own aesthetic so customers associate it with your account. For example, if you see a photo that has a deep red aesthetic, you may assume it is us.
The goal of storytelling: 
When storytelling through social media your main goal is to get your audience more engaged. Therefore they are going to want to consume more and more content. If you are strictly just trying to use posts to simply boost sales of products, then your marketing will not be effective.
Creating sharable content:
Your content should excite or inspire your customers. Doing so will provoke a response from your audience so they will want to share your story with their audience (in a positive manner). A social media account we recommend for storytelling is Humans of New York (@humansofny on Instagram).
Make your business come to life:
When storytelling through social media, we recommend creating posts that show off the people who make your business come to life. By doing so, you will grab the attention of your audience. People connect with other people and want to see what happens behind the scenes of the business, and who an employee truly is. Some prompts you may consider are showcasing what you’re doing, how a particular employee contributes to the business, or even a day in a life post.
Video storytelling:
Using videos is the best method of storytelling. It allows you to be your genuine self and captures the attention of users faster than any infographic/photo will. Reels are an extremely popular method of video storytelling. Live streams are another great way for video storytelling because your audience sees your authentic self and actual reactions.
If you have any inquiries or just want some extra help on storytelling marketing, don’t hesitate to shoot us an email at info@germono.com. We’d love to help!
