Category: Marketing

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Eight Facebook Story Ideas for Increased Engagement

Creating Facebook stories is a fun and creative way to engage and interact with your target audience. However, suppose you want to stay ahead of your competition and get the most out of what Facebook can bring to your business. In that case, you need to take the time to craft compelling, interactive, and highly valuable stories.

 

Here are eight Facebook story ideas to try to increase your audience engagement and business success on this platform:

 

  • Ask a Thought-Provoking Question – One way to really boost engagement and action from your audience is to make them think. So ask a question without giving your answer, giving them time to respond. Then you can give them your solution that feels more conversational while also learning more about your audience gleaning information that can be used in the future for more content.

 

  • Share Something Behind-The-Scenes – Your true fans love finding out more about you. They like feeling like they’re VIPs getting a stage pass by getting a sneak peek into the behind-the-scenes goings-on. Show them how you set up for a shoot, or how you make your product, or whatever you want that you think they want to know. If you aren’t sure, ask them.

 

  • Use A Trendy Topic for Inspiration – While you do need to keep going with a thought-out content plan that is based on the future offerings, you also want to pay close attention to trending topics that you can create off the cuff by sharing your thoughts or otherwise engaging with your audience around that trend.

 

  • Share a Meme or Infographic – If you have no other ideas about what to share, look at your current offerings and grab a meme or develop an infographic from them to showcase parts of your message.

 

  • Tell a Real Story – Do you have a story to share relevant to your audience that they can learn from or even be entertained by engaging with it? Tell a real story about yourself or your business, or even a customer.

 

  • Showcase Popular Products – If you sell products, showcase them on your stories as if you’re doing a review for them. You can also do reviews for others if you’re an affiliate right on your stories.

 

  • Highlight Your Email Newsletter or Opt-In – Create a story all about your email newsletter or opt-in that you’ve created.

 

  • Have Fun with Staff or Influencer Takeovers – A really fun thing to do is let someone else take over your page, or you take over someone else’s page who markets to your audience a complementary product or service.

 

Test these Facebook story ideas to see what personal benefits they can provide to your business. Each idea may suit certain business goals or niches better, so it is important to get to know your target audience and take risks to understand them better. Just because one post doesn’t deliver the results you want or need doesn’t mean the next idea won’t, nor does it mean you have failed. A proper social media content plan includes being aware of where you need to improve and doing the work to get there.

 

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The Facebook Story Strategies to Follow for Business

Facebook stories are short clips, pictures, videos, audio clippings, or other animations shared at the top of followers’ Facebook or Messenger app and to the top right above the newsfeed of the desktop version. All a follower needs to do is tap on the profile picture of the story content they want to watch to view the content.

 

A blue ring will appear around the profile picture of Facebook users who have new stories for you to watch. These stories give businesses a more fun and attractive way to market to their target audience, increasing their success on the platform and as a sustainable and functioning business.

 

Here are five Facebook story strategies to follow to further grow and market your business on this platform:

 

Completely Fill in Your Facebook Page

 

Don’t leave any information out that Facebook asks for when you create your new page for your business. The most active pages have the most information for their audience. You’ll want to link them to your website, your other relevant content on the net and provide any answers they need to make a buying choice.

 

Enhance Your Facebook Stories with Creative Tools and Music

 

The tools Facebook offers to upgrade your stories are filters, graphics, words, and also music. You can replace any background sounds on videos captured for Facebook Stories using your Smartphone simply by using Facebook’s own editor in your phone. It’s not hard to do at all. Click around and give it a try so you can learn your systems and tools.

 

Keep Track and Up to Date with Facebook Stories Analytics

 

Use your analytics to do better. Don’t trust your own opinions about how your stories or posts are doing. Trust the metrics captured instead. This way, you can improve with each content update by doing what your audience wants most instead of what you happen to like.

 

Link Your Account with Instagram

 

The same company owns Facebook and Instagram, so you must go ahead and connect your Facebook account with Instagram to make use of both and double your views.

 

Use Facebook Story Highlights

 

The stories you create are automatically saved in your private story archives, which you can make live again whenever you want to. In addition, you can use these stories that were captured and shared to build a highlights reel so that your audience can learn more about you easily.

 

If you want to gain the most reward out of your Facebook story content, you must implement these strategies for your business. These tips ensure you use the platform and its features correctly and wisely to gain your audience’s attention and keep them interested and active with your brand. The more interested and engaged they are with the value you provide, the more likely they will purchase your products or services.

 

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Five Ways to Customize Your Facebook Stories

It is said that Facebook reaches more than half of the world’s social networking population. It is also the second most downloaded smartphone application in the world. Two facts that should show you why Facebook is still an important tool to utilize and understand fully.

 

Each day nearly three hundred million people and businesses, just like you, post to their Facebook stories. While still not as popular as Instagram stories, it is still a beneficial tool to understand as Facebook continues to be a leading social media platform worldwide.

 

The following are five ways to customize your Facebook stories to increase your brand awareness:

 

Use Text Creatively

 

Adjust the size and use more than one font style. Fix the position, add captions, add a background color. Consider learning more about graphic design so that your thumbnails look captivating or use templates you can find on Canva and other websites.

 

Add Motion

 

With your camera, text, or other stickers and graphics, guide your viewers’ eye to the parts of the content you want them to view and act on the most. For example, if you want them to take action, visual motion cues to guide them toward the right buttons will help.

Four Benefits to Using Snapchat Stories to Market your Business

Have Fun with Filters and other Effects

 

People are sometimes critical of filters and effects when you’re trying to make someone look different than they really look, but the truth is, these filters and effects are fun and grab attention. So use them as much as you want or as little as you want but have fun.

 

Selfie Filters and Picture Filters

 

Try out the various selfie and picture filters that you can use to make your stories stand out. Facebook offers multiple filters. Currently, it’s the magic wand on the bottom left when you’re in the app. The filters show up at the bottom of the screen. Try out some fun filters on holidays or other special days to make your content stand out.

 

Try Out Boomerang

 

This app gives a looping effect to your stories and images. It blurs the background and brings faces into focus with an extra glow. They’re kind of like animated GIFS but play your video forward and backward. It can grab attention for different stories that you share.

 

Ask Your Audience to Join In

 

User-generated content, questions, and polls, anything that gets your audience involved is highly powerful content. But, if you want engagement or action from your audience, remember that you have to tell them what to do, tell them what’s in it for them, and then tell them what to do again.

 

Be sure to follow these tips when creating your Facebook stories if you want to keep your audience engaged and fully interested in your business or services. Creating consistent, engaging, and valuable Facebook stories is vital if you’re keeping your audience interested and active on the platform, growing your authority and brand awareness within the industry, and generating more sustainable leads.

 

 

 

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Five Tips for Using YouTube and YouTube Stories for Business

To squeeze more benefits out of your YouTube channel and stories, you need to plan and make quality content for your target audience. YouTube is only as beneficial as the content you bring to your viewers.

 

Thankfully, you can follow many tried and true methods or tips to ensure you get the most out of this platform. In addition, once you reach the required number of subscribers, you can also unlock their story features, giving you yet another valuable tool to creating better and more engaging content.

 

The following are five tips on using YouTube and YouTube stories to market your business effectively:

 

Create Content That Provides Value or Solves a Problem

 

While you also need to post highly valuable long-form content, stories should be no exception. However, make it more interactive and always think about how you can get the viewers involved. Think of the content you create as a conversation between a family member or another loved one.

 

Build Community

 

Use the reply to comment in the story feature to build a strong bond and community with your viewers and audience. Don’t ignore their comments or responses. This tool allows you to do it more directly and personally. Further increasing your credibility and trust as a business and a YouTuber. Adding a “Mention.”

 

Share Announcements or Updates

Use YouTube stories to update your audience with brand new information or product announcements and releases. Add an option for them to reply to get their direct feedback, and be sure to find a certain amount of time to respond to as many as you can.

 

Tease Your Next Long-Form Video

 

YouTube must have regular video content in order to take advantage of its stories features. The main purpose of the YouTube stories feature is to keep your audience subscribed and involved with your brand or niche. In other words, it further installs the value you bring to them with your long-form videos. So never miss a moment to share your new videos. YouTube stories provide a feature called the “Video” sticker to do this very thing – making it a super simple and easy process to get started.

 

Think Mobile

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Finally, but certainly not least, YouTube stories can only be viewed on mobile – giving you another way to create different and new content.

 

Be sure you take advantage of the benefits YouTube provides by following each of these tips. The more you put into your YouTube channel, the more benefits your business will receive. Quality and engaging content allow you to build the community you need to market your business better and achieve your goals.

 

 

 

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Four Top Benefits to Using YouTube and YouTube Stories

Getting noticed against the massive online competition can make any small business feel overwhelmed and inadequate. However, a tool can make it easier to get noticed and be seen as an authority within your niche or industry. This can be done by creating and starting a well-run and quality YouTube channel. Eventually, once you gain ten thousand subscribers, you can unlock the story feature to better market to your target audience and reach even more followers or subscribers.

 

Here are more benefits to using YouTube and their stories feature for business:

 

To Get a Chance to Market to Nearly One Billion Monthly Users

 

Using YouTube gives you a low-cost and sometimes free way to reach a global audience depending on the tools or resources you need to create a high-quality and valuable video.

 

To Rank Higher on Googles Search Engine Results Page

 

The main power of YouTube relies on the fact that it is a search engine. The second-largest just behind Google. Even better is that Google owns YouTube, meaning your long-form content video will rank well when people search from Google. It is essentially the same engine. Did you know nearly ninety percent of clicks made after a Google search are from the first ten organic results? So reaching the first page and near the top is an important goal when creating your videos.

 

To Grow Your List and Traffic to Your Website

 

Stories are essential to YouTube as they help you further engage your audience and hopefully convert them to loyal and paying customers. To accomplish this, use the feature for advertising and growing your email list. In turn, this will also increase your website traffic and potentially increase your revenue.

 

To Increase Engagement and Make a More Obvious Impact

 

Furthermore, once you reach ten thousand subscribers, you will want to use the stories feature to enhance further your engagement and exposure against your current audience and subscribers. Just because they subscribed or followed your link to sign up for your newsletter or email campaign does not mean you should rely on it to keep their attention. Stories appear on YouTube’s platform, giving you another way to keep their attention and further away from your competition. The more valuable and useful you make the story, the more likely they are to share it to grow your subscribers list too.

 

Sixty-two percent of businesses took advantage of these benefits in 2019. The fact is, the more your YouTube channel grows, the more successful your business becomes. Add to the growth and success of your business by adding a YouTube channel to your business marketing plan today. The more value you show your target audience, the more chance you have at success.

 

 

 

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How to Use YouTube Stories for Business

Every single day nearly one billion hours of content is viewed on YouTube daily. With around thirty million visitors every day, there is no reason you shouldn’t be taking advantage of this platform if you run or want to own a business. YouTube and its story feature are powerful avenues to better market your products, services, values, and ideas to your target audience. It also provides you a chance to create powerful and beneficial content in order to build a community that benefits your brand. YouTube stories are short clips only viewable from a smartphone and available to your audience for seven days.

 

The following is how to use YouTube stories for your business:

 

First Understand the Requirements

 

You must have 10,000 subscribers first in order to unlock the story feature. While this can be a downside to many business owners, you need to remember that YouTube is a great marketing tool. Additionally, note that you will not have this feature if you set your audience to kids.

 

Find the Plus Icon on Your Smart Phone and Select “Add to your story.”

 

The plus icon is located near the bottom center of your screen when you open the YouTube smartphone application. After you select the plus sign, you then need to select “add to your story.” If you do not see this as an option, your channel has yet to reach the requirements or needs to wait seven more days for the feature to appear.

 

Record a Video or Snap a Photo and Enhance

 

Tap or hold down the red record button, then save, trim, add text, stickers, or polls that enhance your content and make it more engaging. There are three more important stickers to include: video stickers to help promote a video, mention stickers to mention other YouTubers, and location stickers to reach your audience in a certain location.

 

Share and Reply to Comments in a Story for Extra Engagement

 

Finally, you can share the post once you believe the quality is right for your audience. Be sure to stay engaged with your audience. Don’t just post a story and then forget about them. If they are interacting, reply or post new stories to keep it up. The more value and engagement you bring to YouTube, the more successful your business will be.

 

Be sure to reply to comments to increase your engagement. You can do this by going to your profile and selecting comments. Then below the comment, you would like to reply select “reply in story.” Finally, record or upload your reply and choose post to share.

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Just like other platforms, the YouTube Story feature is straightforward and easy to use. Once you post your story, they are viewable from your channel for all your subscribers to see and last for a full seven days. The more you can connect to your target audience, the more you can grow and increase your success on the platform.

 

 

 

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Increase Your Snapchat Story Views with These Easy Tips

While Snapchat can bring your business many benefits, it can be one of the hardest platforms to gain views. In order to gain more followers, you need more views, just like any other social media platform. Because Snapchat focuses on close friendships rather than discovery, it takes more work to find new followers and gain more views. However, as long as you make unique, fresh, and inspiring content while using other tools and tips, it can be quite easy to gain more views.

 

Here are four tips to help you attract more Snapchat story views:

 

Increase Your Snapchat Score

 

Your Snapchat score is displayed below your profile picture and username. This number increases every time you send and receive a Snap or story. In other words, this number indicates how active you are on the platform. Use this scoring feature to encourage and motivate you to be more active and show new followers that you are a real business that provides value by sharing snaps and stories.

 

Get Featured on the Discover Page

 

Use location tags and hashtags, and be sure to add your story to the “Our Story” section from your editor tool after you post your story. The Discover page is Snapchat’s version of a newsfeed that features stories from publishing partners, influencers, or other brands.

 

Use Other Platforms Too

 

Having an Instagram or YouTube to advertise your Snapchat is always a good idea. It shows others that you have more than one way to communicate with them, and they may find Snapchat a more personal tool to connect with. However, be sure the content you share on each platform is different in some way. In other words, don’t repurpose without editing the content you share on the other platform. This increases your exposure on each platform and keeps you in good standing with them as many platforms strive for original content.

 

Keep a Consistent and Frequent Posting Schedule

 

The more quality content you provide, the more likely your current followers are to share your content.  Keep this content consistent and frequent throughout your day to keep your stories at the top of your follower’s feed. However, be sure the content you share always provides value. You don’t want just to throw up anything or share the same boring sales piece. Always enhance each of your stories with stickers, including one of your Snapcode, so new viewers can instantly add you. When they take a picture of this code through Snapchat, it will add you to their follower list.

 

When developing your Snapchat story content plan, keep these tips in mind to ensure you get the most views and gain more followers. Remember, make sure the content you post on Snapchat is unique and different from any other platform. Please take advantage of their tools and features and find a way to get on their discovery page to increase your chances of success on Snapchat.

 

Be More Accountable and Consistent, Share Your Goals

 

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Four Benefits to Using Snapchat Stories to Market your Business

Did you know that there are nearly three hundred million active daily users on Snapchat, making Snapchat among the most popular social media networks worldwide, just behind Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok?

Almost forty percent of the world’s leading brands already know this and use Snapchat to market their products on a daily basis.

 

What’s even more powerful is that those who use Snapchat use the application for more than twenty minutes a day, right behind Facebook users.

Yet again showing you that Snapchat is still a powerful business tool to be taking advantage of.

 

Here are four more benefits to using Snapchat stories to market your business:

 

Drive Traffic and Boost Engagement

 

The purpose of social media stories on many platforms is to increase your audience engagement and boost your traffic or sales. The high number of daily active users means your chances of success on this platform are quite high if you use the platform right and market to a younger audience.

 

Connect to a Younger Demographic

 

Many of the users on Snapchat are said to be between the ages of twenty-four and twelve, which means if millennials and generation Z are the people you need to market to, don’t delay using Snapchat.

 

Offer a More Fun and Unique Customer Experience

 

Snapchat offers different and more unique features than other platforms. Their additional AR filters are by far the most popular. These are artificial filters that change how you, others, or animals look when shown on camera. They can even change your background, make it look like you are doing a certain action, and change the sound of your voice – making it a fun way to communicate with your audience and be less formal. While other platforms offer this, the ones created on Snapchat are often said to be more creative, fun, and easy to use.

 

Add Personality and Keep Followers Updated

 

The features Snapchat offers allow you to be more relatable and show your personality more. It is also a better way to share new and upcoming information about your brand or business. In addition, offering your audience your human side makes it more likely to grow an audience that trusts you and your credibility.

 

These benefits should inspire you to give Snapchat a try for your business. If you have a product-based business that anyone under thirty-five can use or would be interested in, Snapchat is the place to be. Its unique features make it a fun and personal experience for you and your target audience.

 10 Ways to Get to Know Your Audience Better

 

 

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How to Use Snapchat Stories

Snapchat stories are a fun marketing tool to use for businesses that need to advertise to a younger demographic. Around fifty-nine percent of those between twenty-four and thirty who use the internet use Snapchat. In 2019, the application had three hundred million downloads ranking them the seventh most downloaded application globally, showing you just how powerful Snapchat still is and can be to businesses. In fact, it is said that those who use Snapchat are sixty percent more likely to make an impulse buy. Meaning, if you have a product business, you should be using Snapchat.

 

Here are the four steps to using Snapchat stories:

 

Step One: Select Your Profile or Swipe to the Camera Function

 

To get to your profile, select your picture from the top left of the screen. Then select “Add to My Story” below “My Stories,” your photo, and your username. The second way to create a story is to swipe to the camera or click the camera icon currently located at the bottom center of the screen.

 

Step Two: Create Your Snap or Upload

 

From here, there are several different ways to create your story. Simply tap or hold to record or click the two small boxes located to the left of the record button. A new screen called “Memories” will appear where you will need to click “Stories” below the search box. Then click “Start a Story” to create a story with previous Snaps. The third way to create a story is to select the smile emoji next to the record button to pick a filter.

 

Step Three: Enhance with Features and Tags

 

Once you create the content, a menu to the right will appear. This menu includes adding text, stickers, choosing your font type or color, and adding popular emojis. You can also add music, links and change the time of how long each frame appears.

The most important feature from this list is the stickers that look like a post-it note. This is where you can make your stories more engaging and interactive.

 

Step Four: Select “Story” From the “Send To” Page

 

When satisfied with the way your story looks, it is time to post it. First, select “Send to”  then “My story” on the next page if you used the camera feature. If you created the story straight from your profile, select the play button that appears at the bottom right.

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Overall, getting used to editing and other features is what makes Snapchat different. Once you get used to adding them, you can improve your contact and engagement with your audience over time. Snapchat is a great tool for businesses that have a younger target audience and highly visual content. Follow these steps to get your first Snapchat story live in no time.