Instagram : social media storytelling and engagement
Storytelling & Instagram
The storytelling within the field of communication and advertising, is a communication technique that is made to create a narrative in order to convince an audience, to buy a product for example. A story starts with a beginning and concludes with an end : this is a structure well adopted and well understood by the human brain according to Locowise.
Build a communication strategy around storytelling especially on social media has the power to mobilize the cognitive functions of an audience such as emotions and rationality according to the researches conducted by Frederick Aldama. On Instagram a visual storytelling has to follow a certain coherency or order to be understandable by the audience targeted.
A storytelling on Instagram generally requires authenticity or fun or glamorous pictures depending on the image and the values of the company. Its aims at create attractiveness towards audiences. Instagram offers a huge various range of application in order for you to make your content standing out of other brands content (Boomerang, Layout).
Interactivity & engagement
One of the major aims of using a storytelling on Instagram, is to create interactivity by touching people’s emotions in a way or another. And this interactivity is allowed by the various functions of Instagram, by which users are able to express themselves around a content uploaded by a brand : likes, subscribe, comment, react to a story, all those actions are ways for a brand to develop a relationship and exchange with the audience. Those available actions generate engagement from users towards brand content and posts on Instagram. The brand has to make the relationship last as long as possible.
The best practices to create and maintain this engagement with users on Instagram are for example to keep a daily presence on the feed : post regularly, be visible everyday, use a speech which is “confortable” and accessible for the target the brand aims at.
Those engagement actions are available through Instagram functions, but they can also comes from the creativity of the brand and the way those functions are going to be used : integrate polls in the pictures or videos, asking questions regularly with possible choices, a well-prepared social media strategy needs to be planned on a daily model, divided according times of the day.
Less fake, more authenticity
Lately, more and more Instagram users have shown their angriness towards the publications of several influencers. The social media is known for the publication of THE perfect pictures, without any defects : that perfection is today criticized by a lot of users, tired of seeing perfect fake bodies, fake advertisings with unrealistic promises. The audience’s trust towards brands but also influencers is going down. There is an urgent need in communication on Instagram to be more authentic, its calls more and more transparency.
