Similar to Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories are a fast, engaging, and authentic way to create content. Over 150 million Facebook users are using Stories every day, including businesses.
Why are they so important? Unlike a typical public post, Stories can provide an intimate and authentic view inside an organization’s day-to-day. These “behind the scenes” posts offer transparency, increased brand trust, and loyalty. Our beginner’s guide to Facebook Stories will teach you everything you need to know to launch your first successful story!
How To Make Facebook Stories
Step 1: Gather Up the Basics
Make sure your business has a Facebook Page and access to a camera. Facebook Stories are optimized for vertical handheld devices, so it’s ideal to create your story using a mobile device.
Step 2: Choose Your Image
There are three main visual categories for Facebook stories; previously taken images, new images, and text content.
Previously taken images: These can be images or video from your photo library, user-generated content, or an externally sourced image.
New images: You can take a new image by using your mobile camera. Facebook Stories supports normal photos, videos, boomerangs, and live content. When taking a new image you can adjust the lighting settings, camera settings, and use face filters.
Text Content: You can type in text and choose a background, making it a text-only image.
Step 3: Add Details
When it comes to sprucing up your post, the options are practically endless. Facebook offers dozens of creative tools such as stickers, location tags, feelings, polls, text, drawings, effects, and call-to-action buttons. These elements can add context and personality to a post, while also promoting action.
Step 4: Post
Now, it’s time to share your creation. You can choose to share the content to your Facebook Story, Facebook timeline, or both.
Step 5: Track using Analytics
Like everything else on Facebook, Stories have analytics too. Within your insights tab, you can view the number of unique opens, positive engagements, negative engagements, and actions taken on your story. These analytics provide insights on how you can improve your content for future stories.
Linking to Instagram
Instagram Stories can be shared directly to Facebook Stories, but should you be posting the same content on both Instagram and Facebook? Sometimes it’s beneficial to curate original content for Facebook instead of automatically cross-posting your content from Instagram. It all comes down to knowing your respective audiences and responding to relevant analytics.
Stories Ads
Facebook Stories ads offer the same objectives as Instagram Stories ads, including reach, brand awareness, video views, app installs, conversion, traffic, and lead generation. Stories also support Facebook’s suite of targeting and measurement tools which help drive positive actions and generate leads.
What Should You Post?
Facebook Stories can be used to share snippets of everyday activities, blog posts, recent news, or to start conversations. The goal is to create unique content that attracts and engages your audience.
Since Stories expire after 24 hours, it wouldn’t be a good idea to post content that is evergreen or has longevity. Don’t post anything today that will still be true a week or a month from now. You can use Stories to announce posts of this type but, otherwise, Stories should be used for time-sensitive content or announcements. Snow days, limited-time sales, or limited availability of products are all excellent opportunities for a Stories post. These types of posts also create a push for followers to take you up on your call-to-action.
And, as we mentioned, Stories is also a good place to broadcast your regular feed posts as well.
When Should You Post?
It’s normally recommended to post on Facebook when your audience is most active, but this isn’t necessarily true for Facebook Stories. Stories remain on the top of your News Feed for 24 hours before being deleted. This gives a large window of time for your audience to view the content. Even if you post the story while your audience is offline, it’ll still be at the top of their News Feed the next time they open the app.
Facebook Stories are still in their adoption phase, so we recommend that you start utilizing them immediately. There’s no better time to start sharing fast-paced, relatable content for your audience!
