Social Media Storytelling: The Way to Your
Audiences’ Hearts is Through a Good Story
Have you ever had those moments where you read a novel once and remember what that one minor character said that one time but stutter and stumble while trying to remember an answer you swore you spent days studying and revising?
Don’t worry; you’re not the only one.
The reason you can vividly recall a story is because it keeps you interested with its use of language, its plot twists make you say ‘I did not see that coming’, you feel like you can relate to the perfectly flawed characters, and the cliffhangers, oh the cliffhangers sometimes make you want to chuck the book across the room and rage about it on social media.
While all an academic book does is give you information, and important as it may be, you just can’t find it in you to get interested because why would you want to read about plants or statistics or trigonometry when your favorite underrated character is about to die.
And that is the exactly how social media storytelling is different from a typical social media post.
Social Media Storytelling? What’s That?
When people hear the word “story” they think books or movies, but really, aren’t stories all around us? Your best friend ranting to you about how she’s having the worst week is a story, so is the saga of your pet cat ruining the sofa that your mom relates to you over the phone.
Stories go beyond the ‘Once Upon a Time’s’ and ‘Happily Ever After’s’ of a good book, they surpass the action sequences you see on the screen; a story is any narrative, real or fictional, that captivates you in the moment and holds your attention way after it’s over.
Storytelling, in the social media marketing sense, means that you use social media to tell your brands story, to convey its voice.
Oh, so it’s just another strategy to get more leads?
No.
Social media storytelling is not just a tactic to sell your products or services. In fact, if you use it as a tactic, your stories come off as a gimmick rather than an actual story. People don’t like indulging in gimmicks.
The goal isn’t to sell your product; that comes later. With storytelling, you tell your audience what your brand is all about.
The Ingredients of Good Storytelling
Every good book is a balanced mix of three vital ingredients (sure, there are more but these are the vital ones): The Protagonist; The Goal; and The Development. These three ingredients also make up a good brand story so let’s begin to understand what each one is and why they’re so important.
1. Protagonist
Every good book needs a protagonist; The Hunger Games has Katniss Everdeen, The Lord of the Rings has Frodo Baggins. In case of social media storytelling, your brand is the protagonist and just like any protagonist, your brand needs to have a personality, strengths, and flaws. Taking a note of the ideals your brand values and analyzing the history of your company is a good way to learn about these ‘personality traits’.
Obviously, these traits will keep changing as the company grows; in fact you should make sure they are changing (for the better) because a protagonist who doesn’t change as the story is called a ‘flat character’ and no one like reading a story that stars a flat character.
2. Goal
Another important characteristic of a good book is that it has a goal that the protagonist wants to or needs to fulfill. You can find your goal somewhere in your business plan. There are two types of goals that writers chalk down for their Main Character: internal goal and external goal.
Analyze your business plan. What is the core objective of your business? Do you want to get more leads? Or increase sales? Or are you looking at expanding in the future? Whatever it may be, make a note of it because that is your internal goal.
Now, your audience is really not interested in your internal goal. They don’t care about your profit margin or sales numbers; they care about their experience. So your external goal needs to be something that pertains to your audience. It could be something as philanthropic as ‘bringing education to the rural areas’ (like P&G’s Shiksha) or something as simple as ‘making your life easy’ (Amazon’s Echo).
Having a clear view of your internal and external goals is essential because you will have to build your brand story in a way that fulfills both of them.
3. Development
In the end, what makes a story substantial and relatable is not the back story or even the captivating finale; it is the development, or rather, how the writer chooses to develop the story. This includes everything from the language, to the tone, the plot points the writer chooses to highlight, etc.
Digital Marketers tend to forget the development part of brand story. It’s not their fault really; social media, by nature, is built with people and brands talking about themselves and it’s easy to forget to develop your brand story among promoting new products, keeping up an active interaction with the audience, and coming up with new content all the time.
But, like mentioned earlier, a character with no growth makes for a flat character. Similarly, a story with no development is a dull, boring story.
Imagine that your protagonist (your brand) is at point A and the goal (both internal and external) is at point Z, development is how your MC progresses from point A to B to C and so on. Just like in a novel, it is important that you keep an eye on what kind of language you are using and what tone you’re implying. This is crucial because using the wrong words or tone can easily make something intended to be sassy come out as mean.
The Brand Archetypes
So you have the puzzle pieces for your brand story, now what? That’s a question that haunts every writer that has ever had a story idea, which is why people have come up with ‘archetypes’. These three archetypes of social media story telling will give you a starting point from where you can develop you brand story.
But remember; an archetype is simply a rough outline, a prototype; you can’t depend on it completely and you are allowed to diverge from it or combine various archetypes to make one that fits your business plan best.
1. Synecdoche: The Highly Underrated Writing Trick
Synecdoche means “using a part to represent the whole (or vice versa)” and it’s a really fun figure of speech to write. In this archetype, you use a part (your brands ideals) to represent the whole (the brand). An easy way to do this is lacing your posts with your ideals.
As an example, Airbnb is an app that relies on goodcustomer experience and aesthetic photographs. To tell their brand story, they combine these two and post photos submitted to them by their hosts and guests and add a story to it. They then post these stories on Facebook as posts or via albums dedicated to particular hosts. This helps them grow out of simply being an app their guests use and become partners in the stories of their hosts, changing the narrative from “hey, look at this beautiful place” to “take a look at the wonderful people who live in the place”.
2. Origins: The Classic Storytelling Trope
New businesses that have the advantage of adding digital marketing in the very core of their business plan can use the classic “start from the start” way of telling their brand story. This means including your audience into your story from the beginning. If you can’t do it from the very start, you can apply this archetype to one of your future marketing campaigns. You should interact with your audience and find out what they want before you create your content and a build a living campaign around feedback.
Yes, this requires you to be quick in your work and have a large amount content production capacity, but in return this method generates authentic conversations and actionable audience engagement.
The hotel chain Marriott used this method by stalking the social media of their guests (and the guests didn’t even mind!)
Even if you don’t choose to follow this method, there is a valuable lesson you learn from it: Listen to your audience.
3. Spoilers: The Unconventional Way of Storytelling
This is perhaps an archetype that used the least but has a lot of potential. In this archetype, you kickoff your brand narrative by revealing the end (every bookworm is probably screaming “SPOILERS!!!” at their screen right now — I did the same when I read it the first time). No, I didn’t mistype an entire sentence; this archetype really does start by revealing the end (“gasp! They said it again!!”), but it’s not as horrific as you think.
It’s a little like those movies where they start off with an intense fight or a comedic situation the MC is in with them saying “You’re probably wondering how I got myself into this situation” and then the screen fades to the actual beginning and the story progresses so we get to see exactly how the protagonist got themselves into that situation.
Basically, all you do is reveal the goal at the very beginning of your campaign and then including your audience in the journey to show them how you’re progressing. Elon Musk’s SpaceX pulled this off perfectly by announcing in 2016 their intent of sending their spacecraft to Mars by 2018. They then included people in this journey by strapping streaming devices to most of their craft, regularly tweeting updates, and even shared videos of all of their fails (it’s magnificent, to be honest).
If you noticed, there is a common element in all the three archetypes: include your audience in your story; and that is basically how brand stories succeed. Your customers are a big part of your company. The community you build around your brand plays a major role in your brand story; you can’t hope to succeed by isolating yourself from it.
Including them doesn’t only mean organizing drives and getting them to participate directly in your brand story. It also means creating content that your audience can relate to, talking to them on social media, giving out regular updates, sharing their stories with the world; anything to make them feel involved with your story.
That’s what makes a brand story unforgettable.
