Social Media Stories are Booming: Try These Best Practices
Spin Creative • July 3, 2021
It started with Snapchat, but now most of the major social media platforms—especially Instagram and Facebook—offer social media “stories.” These photos and mini videos disappear after 24 hours (unless you highlight them on your profile), offering a unique opportunity to show off your brand. Consult our creative agency in seattle and get the best plan for your stories.
Whether you want to ramp up engagement before a product launch, learn more about your customers or just remind them that you exist, it’s important that you understand how to use social media stories effectively. Here are a few tips.
Use the right format specs
If you want your social media presence to be effective, it needs to be flawless from start to finish. Surprisingly, many brands fail to understand the way different platforms present various types of media. Story dimensions often differ from the usual format you’d use on a given platform.
At the very minimum, you should understand each platform’s story size, length and file size limitations. Otherwise, your stories will look distorted. Videos
might cut off at awkward times, and what looked great on your laptop screen could be illegible on your smartphone.
When you work with a professional production company, you can rest assured that your creative partner will know each platform’s parameters. However, if you’re going it alone, you’ll need to get familiar with these important details. It might take extra time to reformat content for each individual platform, but the payoff is worth it.
Make it interactive for better engagement
These days, it is all too easy to mindlessly binge-watch a screen. That goes for social media scrolling, too. As a brand, your goal is to break through that passivity to engage
potential customers.
Making your social media stories interactive is the easiest way to get their attention. Platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook offer a number of different interactive features to engage customers. Quizzes, polls and Q&A boxes are a great way to pique their interest.
There are endless ways to utilize these features. Consider having a brand spokesperson solicit questions, then answer the best ones in a professional video. Use polls to gather information about your followers and their preferences, like “Which 2022 planner style is perfect for your #goals?” You can even let users vote on what kind of content they’d like to see next. The bottom line is, if you make your audience feel like their input is valuable, they’ll be more likely to trust your brand later.
Don’t skimp on quality
Finally, it’s important to ensure your videos are high quality—even if they’re only 10 seconds long. Your social media stories reflect upon your brand every bit as much as your print ads and TV spots do. Don’t give customers the impression that you cut corners on quality, or they’ll associate that with your products and services.
Few brands realize how much work social media stories are until they try to create one. That’s where the team at Spin Creative comes in. Say hello
today, and we can discuss the best way to produce high-quality, professional social media videos that get the engagement you deserve.
Spin Creative is a video production company and creative agency helping marketers create winning video and creative strategies that engage, inspire and activate targeted audiences. Spin is headquartered in Seattle with offices in San Francisco and London, serving brands around the globe.
At Spin Creative, we believe the most effective product stories go beyond features—they tap into a clear, emotionally resonant narrative that connects with real people. That’s the lens we brought to our collaboration with Microsoft Viva, where our challenge was clear: create a high-impact video that visually captures how Copilot AI empowers people at work.
The end result? A fully 3D-animated brand film designed to wow audiences at executive keynotes, tradeshows, and enterprise events. But how we got there is just as important as what we delivered.
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