IG STORIES: Creating high-value content with a low budget on social media

On social media, stories are typically a function that featuring a photo or a video in the form of short, time-limited (normally 15 seconds) running sequences automatically. Those will display on a user's profile page vertically on mobile devices and then disappear after 24 hours. This function was first introduced on Snapchat, but this feature was quickly followed by other platforms like Instagram.

The first impression of stories on social media is that they seem to be ineffective to the audience due to their short-lived, but in reality, they are pretty universally liked by audiences of all kinds and relevant for a majority of businesses as they offer a wide range of use cases to explore, especially younger demographics.

For example, Bơ by Butterman, a small bakery uses Instagram stories to keep nearly 100k followers informed about the store. Looking at the daily stories, it can be seen that the store featuring quick news, showing the available stock of pastries, reminding discount events, updating shipping fees with a short video or pictures (Figure 1). Bơ can use stories successfully by sending a series of messages that are relatively affordable to create, and easy for audiences to view.

Figure 1: Promotions, updates, etc daily updated on the Stories

Bơ can also present an opportunity to showcase the customer "behind a kitchen", something that is more authentic aspect of an organization (Figure 2). Moreover, Bơ can repost customer feedback to their stories so other customers can see their product’s quality (Figure 3). And last but not least, they also take advantage of story-specific features like Polls, Hashtags and Questions to earn opportunities to engage your audience and collect customers statistics (Figure 4). Bơ can directly get feedback and comments on the services and products without any internal or external secondary data or a ton of equipment or editing skills.

Figure 2: Kitchen scenes

Figure 3: Customer feedback

Figure 4: Q&A and Poll sections

To sum up, your organization should embrace stories. It is recommended to start with stories on the platform where you're already active. It will be easier as you're already familiar with the social channel, and you stand to gain more benefits when actively posting on the same network's feed and stories.

Source: Bơ by Butterman Instagram