What is a ‘story’ in the concept of Facebook?

Why do you see the word ‘story’ on Facebook?

‘Story’ is the soft and fluffy approach to describing your content that you post on your page.  Each ‘story’ that appears in the news feed will be given a relevance score to each user and dictates how/when/if your content is sent out into Facebook Land.

(not to be confused with ‘stories’ which are image/video based clips shown on mobile format)

Recently Facebook changed the name of the section called About on the front screen to say ‘Our Story’ (in a Note format I hasten to add)

By using the word Story Facebook are trying to encourage content creators like you and me to be creative. Facebook have tried intensely and even more so recently with words like Meaningful, Relevant, & Conversation to make you sit up and pay attention to how you should be crafting your content. Facebook have been, not just hinting, but really slapping you about the face with a Roald Dahl book to encourage you to talk in story format. Hands-up if you have been paying attention?

We live by stories. We learn by stories. History is made by stories. Get the picture?

We are not talking Jackanory on each and every post as such, but let’s start writing in such as way that it is like a story. Let’s list the qualities and values of a story

1. They are naturally memorable (might come in handy)
2. People love stories (find me someone who won’t listen to a story)
3. We love to repeat a story (another hum-dinger of an idea there)
4. When you choose a story format there are different ways to tell the same story (so we could use this idea to say the same thing but different ways)

I may have laid it on a little thick there but essentially what I am trying to say here is that stories are the way forward.

How do you make your Facebook updates fit the story concept?

You could plan a story over 3 episodes i.e. posts. Or, a 28 day kind of story. In other words have a beginning, middle and end to your posts about a specific part of your business. The jargon word for this is strategy … yep a plan.

When you plan out a conversational style collection of posts, that have a theme and a memorable thread =story –  people are more likely to engage.

NB. As each story is ranked according to relevance to each member of your tribe, this is why it is important to post a variety of stories over time to fulfill the likes of each kind of tribe member. This explains why you have highs and lows in your reach and that will always be the case. The skill you can easily learn as a storyteller is to tune in to your tribe and write what they want to read at the right time = News feed visibility [bctt tweet=”We live by stories. We learn by stories. History is made by stories. Get the picture?” username=”fionacatchpowle”]

Think about the TV adverts that have a theme running through them but they are different. This is where your story develops a brand personality and we all know when, whether we see just the middle of the clip that, we are watching a Marks and Spencer’s ad. Or Milk Tray ad. Or a John Lewis Christmas ad!

So, the morale of the story is to think conversation not confrontation