If your social media campaign has recently adopted the “stories” features of Instagram or YouTube, you may not be aware of its origins on Snapchat. The sharing of similar features across different platforms is a testament to the early successes that such innovations have shown by increasing engagement. And for the architects of a social media campaign, this phenomenon may represent opportunities to experiment on one platform and pursue returns with another.
Interesting, despite being the originator of the increasingly popular “stories” feature, Instagram is comparatively unpopular for marketing purposes. Instagram, on the other hand, is infamously good at delivering advertising, but it has struggled to monetize user stories. YouTube is expected to have the same problem. But although this highlights the lag time that might exist when trying to turn popular features into advertisement-delivery systems, the effect might be very different for a social media campaign that uses the same tool.
As long as Instagram is struggling to turn non-commercial stories into a source of revenue, commercial accounts face limited competition in their efforts to reach out directly to the public with their own stories. What’s more, the lack of formal advertising means that few viewers will even think of stories as a marketing tool. In this sense, up-and-coming innovations provide an important opportunity for a social media campaign. They allow that campaign to function as it should: by encouraging consumers to engage with them informally, as they would with any casual acquaintance.
But the longer such features are part of the social media marketing landscape, the more skeptical consumers are liable to become. So it pays to adapt such tools into your social media campaign early. And it pays to put that campaign in the hands of social media professionals whose responsibilities include keeping up to date on the latest developments in the industry.
