How to make storytelling on Facebook? 5 tips to tell your company

What does it mean to do storytelling on Facebook?

Storytelling is an art that of telling stories, with very ancient origins, today easily applicable also to the marketing sector. Word often abused, but has become the basis of many successful social media marketing strategies, as the user has the desire and the need to feel emotionally involved when he follows a company on social networks.

When a company implements a well-made storytelling project, it has the possibility to differentiate itself from other competitors and remain impressed in the user’s mind that, when buying a certain product / service, will certainly remember the brand. This happens because, during the purchase phase, the user is also influenced by non-rational psychological principles and a well-implemented storytelling campaign can be influential in the user-consumer conversion.

Facebook offers many tools for making storytelling: from the publication of native videos to the newly released possibility of telling a story inside the sidebar, passing through the Canvas and publishing graphics and images. The platform now has over 2 billion active users worldwide, of which 33 million in Italy alone. This means that 33 million people enter the platform every day, both as active users to share what they think can be useful to their network, and as passive users for the sole purpose of informing themselves through a non-traditional media.

The storytelling on Facebook for companies starts from the beginning of the construction of the page, hence from the moment of the compilation of the basic fields as information and cover image. The more they are engaging, the greater the chances of having the user’s interest.

Five tips for making storytelling on Facebook

Before learning how to use the tools offered by Facebook for storytelling, however, we must understand how to do it best. Here are our 5 tips to make no mistake in your corporate storytelling project …

Set goals

The storytelling on Facebook and on social networks in general cannot be improvised in any way and, if a company decides to activate a project of this type, it is necessary that it has clear objectives to achieve. The objectives, in the logic of Inbound marketing, certainly cannot be unrealistic as an increase in turnover of 100% (even if we all know that you do marketing to sell) but could be simple steps on which to work and then achieve an increase of turnover, then brand awareness and authoritativeness of the same.

The stories that can be told are endless, the important thing is that they launch messages that can be understood by their target audience.

We always remember that there is no strategy without creativity and there is no creativity without strategy.

Study your buyer personas

A storytelling campaign cannot be destined to all without distinction but must be structured to be understood by its buyer personas. As in real life, you cannot please everyone and you cannot go to everyone, so it is necessary to define who are their ideal customers and to think about what they can like them or not.

For example, if we are a sportswear brand, we will have a dynamic target, interested in the world of sport and who will not be frightened by fatigue. A good storytelling campaign could see the protagonists of the videos in which extreme situations are shown and where the protagonists use the clothing proposed by the company. Certainly for the same target, slow videos could not work, where the protagonists are too far from the sporting world.

The product / service in the background

When doing storytelling on Facebook or on social networks in general, the public wants to see the story, not the product, at the center. The storytelling on the platform will be more visual than non-textual (we know that if there is no visual content, a text post does not get feedback) and must show engaging and exciting situations for the recipient. The product or service offered by the company must never be the absolute protagonist but must be a side dish to the whole story told.

No to self-referencing, yes to values

The storytelling on Facebook is not only visual but can also be textual through the use of tools such as notes, basic information, the canvas units and the new story function in the sidebar of the company pages. When we say storytelling, however, an abandonment of self-referential is required and phrases like the one indicated above are to be avoided worse than the plague. Telling your company on Facebook means finding differentials with respect to competitors, especially today where we are in an era where they are all leaders in the sector (which then is not known).

Everyone has a story to tell, a vision and a mission that makes them different from others, so it is necessary to leverage these elements: so as to be remembered based on values. To date, the target with a greater purchasing power is that of Millennial, which is not only an age range of 15 to 35 years, but is a real category of users who believe a lot in the values transmitted by companies that follows.

Measure the results

To understand if a particular action of a storytelling campaign on Facebook has worked it is important to analyze the results. The Insights offer us many possibilities to understand the progress of all the posts we have published, both in terms of organic and paid visibility. Furthermore, it is possible to analyze the general sentiment of the public using tools like Fanpage. By doing a cross-analysis of the data, in fact, it will be possible to understand the sentiment of the users regarding the brand and to understand if and how to correct the new projects in the future.

The tools for making storytelling on Facebook

Facebook continues to evolve rapidly and provides ever-new tools for designing and creating storytelling strategies among members of a given community. Among the most used tools we have:

• The ability to upload native videos on the platform and to make ADV on them;
• Facebook Canvas;
• The Carousel units;
• The new sidebar that acts as a mini site to tell your company in a smart way;
• The showcase function to better describe offers and products.

Moreover, the storytelling on Facebook can also be done with Messenger through the use of bots set to tell the story of a product or service. Making Facebook storytelling is important for engaging your community and for this reason it is fundamental to have a well-designed and structured strategy able to offer concrete and measurable results.