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Telling Stories In Social Media

Thomas Young is often asked by his clients “How do we know what to post on social media?” It is not usual to find all kinds of trite information on social media, especially when it comes to business accounts. Many companies post information about the events they participate in, or they post pictures of their team. Unfortunately, these posts are often not as engaging as they could be.

The Fundamentals of Storytelling

To make your post more engaging, you will want to follow the fundamentals of storytelling. Young recommends that you think about the challenges that your business goes through, and then try to communicate a sense of suspense to your readers. You do not want your readers to be stressed out, but you want them to be engaged. You want them to really care about what happens in your post.

There is a unique story to be found every day in your company. When you look at these stories as the weeks and months go by, you will start to see the story of your business. The story of your business is powerful because people love to read stories. It is easier to read a story than it is to read business content.

So, explain the challenges of your business, and talk about the people who deal with them. Every company has a protagonist. Every company has suspense and drama. If you hire a content writer who does storytelling, they can do this. It is also something that you can ask your social media marketing team to do.

Most social media posts are micro posts. They do not have very many words. Your blog posts might have 600 words, while your social media posts have only 100 or 200 words. That’s ok, because you can say a lot in 100 to 200 words. When you combine a short post with a photo, the post becomes even more effective.

The best way to tell a story in social media is with visuals. You can talk about what you are doing in an article, but visuals will do the job for you in a much more effective manner. These visuals can be photos with captions, and they can also be videos.

The Story of Your Business and Your Customers

The employees or team members of your company who engage with the customer will be the main sources of information for your story. When you talk to them about what’s going on, they may not know at first that you are putting a story together. You might have to probe and ask questions, like an investigative reporter would. You want to find out what really happened that day at work, and you want to hear some customer stories.

Going directly to your customers for stories is also a great idea. This would involve talking to them, and asking them engaging questions. They will tell you what it is like to work with you. Hearing about what they get out of your relationship might surprise you.

Action Items

  1. Develop a Process for Uncovering the Stories that Happen in Your Company: Write down these stories as if they were novels, with a beginning, middle, and end. Figure out all the different parts of the story that you want to talk about. Google can provide some great ideas for what constitutes a good story.
  2. Find A Way to Use Photography to Tell Stories: Engaging photography with people works best.
  3. Find A Way to Use Video to Tell Stories: Anyone who works in video production will tell you that videos start with the script. That script is the story that you are going to tell, and it will make your video much more engaging.

Thomas Young

Thomas Young is the CEO and Founder of Intuitive Websites. He is a consultant, award winning Vistage speaker and author of “Winning the Website War” and “Sales and Marketing Alignment.” Tom has helped thousands of companies succeed online and has over 25 years digital marketing experience.