Why everyone is experimenting with Instagram Stories like feature?

Authored by Sameer Makani, Managing Director and Co-Founder, Makani Creatives.

2013 was the year when stories came into existence, stories were the reason for Snapchat to gain immense popularity among Gen Z. Snap Stories allowed its users to post 24-hour ephemeral photo and video slideshows that disappear within a day. This form of communication not only gave real time insights of what the person they follow is doing but it also made the interaction more personal and daily which was frequent otherwise.  Instagram on the other hand was also gaining popularity as a platform that could be used for photos and videos until they started stories in august 2016. Eversince the launch, Instagram stories helped the platform in gaining more user base. The Feature “Stories” were later on adapted by different apps on their platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook and now even on LinkedIn and YouTube.

Benefits of Stories- Brand Perspective:

Brands looked at stories as a way for them to post more without overwhelming people’s feeds and as an alternative to Social Media’s Like-driven success theater or a blatant rip-off.Stories had the power to reach their live target audience as stories appear at the top of the old feed, wherein followers can inevitably see them without you needing to build a new audience in a different app.

Through stories, brands could now track their active audience and get a real time measurement of their live audience through it, which in a way gives brands and advertisers a tentative idea of their audience.

Why everyone is adapting the idea of ‘Stories’:

Social Media apps like Instagram, YouTube has even proved to be a huge platform for both creators and celebrities. As a result, Brands perceive these platforms as a way to promote their brand, its product, profitability, audience/customer loyalty, and its offerings through social media influencers. This strategy has even impacted businesses towards brands stability, reorganization, profit and growth. Social media today has become an avenue to promote brand, services or products, this helps in creating a better brand identity on social media platforms through which they can communicate with the audience on real time basis. LinkedIn, with their initiative to launch stories on their platform can directly drive more audience to its application. As, LinkedIn can prove to be a  proper business platform for brands all over, as its audience is already confined to people who are into customer services, expanding businesses and digging out real outcome through it.

What new and innovative has been witnessed through stories these days, are how various brands have got together and teamed up to create content for each other’s stories as well as experimenting and broadcasting unpredictable content. This has resulted in maximum amount of traction and has definitely kept its users engaged through its content while creating some sort of curiosity among the user base as to what the brand is upto. Hence, stories came out magically for brands and its audiences to experimenton new things, gain profit and businesses through it bythinking outside the box.Stories as a way of engaging its audience is being followed by all the major social media platforms like LinkedIn, Times Internet etc. with new and innovative strategies for keeping its audiences interested and for the brand to be extremely popular among its target reach.