Marketers Will Try Outdoing Each Other in Using Stories, Forecasts Augusto Beato

Portland SEO's Augusto Beato expects more marketers to encounter challenges in integrating Stories to their digital marketing strategies as an effective method of reaching their followers.

He was reacting to a report by the Guardian that less polished and more realistic Stories generate the highest engagement.

While stories don’t necessarily require the help of a creative professional, companies need to find a strategy on how to make them work. "Stories need to provide true value: to entertain, inform, or educate, not just sell," said Beato, who is the CEO of Portland. "Stories are a branding opportunity with little place for a heavy-handed call to action, and it will require attention in coming up with the right mix of more time-intensive video, pics, and graphics.

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Stories are vertical, ephemeral slideshows made of a mix of pics and videos shot by users throughout a day. Brands are using Stories to prove their authenticity with behind the scenes content, fun polls, countdowns or engaging videos that can also involve their followers.

It is estimated that there are currently over 970 million accounts who post Stories daily on Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger. And the growth is not slowing down soon, as there is an estimate that there will be more than 1 billion social accounts using Stories by the end of the year.

In fact, Facebook’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, has pretty much hitched the company wagon to Stories, noting, “The Stories format is on a path to surpass feeds as the primary way people share things with their friends sometime next year.”

Vertical content is more appealing for mobile devices and Stories take over most social networks, with Instagram being the most popular platform to use them.