How to use Facebook Stories to grow your brand

What are Facebook Stories?

Facebook Stories are short photo or video collections that disappear after 24 hours. They let you share moments and information in a more temporary and casual way. You can add effects, text, and stickers to your stories, making them more engaging and interactive compared to regular posts.

Unlike normal feed posts, Facebook Stories work differently. They show you the people who watched your content, and other users can also react and reply to your Stories. Any direct message shows up in your inbox and enable you to start conversations with your audience.

Stories appear at the top of your feed, and you can navigate them just by tapping on the screen. Facebook Stories can be accessed from both the web version and mobile app.

The benefits of posting Facebook Stories as a brand

Here are the three main benefits stories can bring to your Facebook marketing strategy:

1. More post visibility
2. Share more updates without spamming your audience’s news feed
3. Showcase your brand’s personality 

1. More post visibility

When you share a Facebook post, there is no guarantee that your followers will see it. With such a large influx of content that changes with every refresh, it’s likely that a percentage of your target audience doesn’t get to see some of your content.

This is much less likely with stories. For 24 hours, stories appear at the top of your audience’s feed. While the order in which the stories appear is determined by an algorithm, it’s much less unforgiving compared to the feed.

Facebook announces that you posted a new Story by showcasing a small preview image of your content with your profile picture attached to it. All the stories appear at the top of the feed, in order of who the user interacts with the most.

The way people watch stories is another reason why they get more views than feed posts. To be more specific, social media users start by clicking on a Facebook story, and then they tap the screen until they go through most, if not all of them. 

You can even share your feed posts as stories to increase visibility on all of your content and give people who missed your last update a chance to see it.

2. Share more updates without spamming your audience’s news feed

Stories also come in handy when you have lots of exciting news to share or if you want to start creating buzz around an upcoming project, event, or launch.

Instead of spamming your audience with multiple announcements on Facebook’s news feed (that might even motivate them to unfollow your page), you can use Facebook stories to post your content. 

After all, this way, you don’t cause any inconveniences. On the contrary, you actually get to achieve your social media goals: reach more people and raise awareness.

3. Showcase your brand’s personality 

Posting on Facebook Stories gives you more freedom. Part of the reason is that it’s low commitment content. It doesn’t appear on your feed, and it vanishes after 24-hours, so people view Facebook stories only if they want to.

Of course, this is not a reason to stray away from your brand guidelines or forget about what it implies to manage a business account, but you can use Facebook Stories to:

1. Give a behind-the-scenes glimpse into your company
2. Allow your target audience to get to know your team
3. Provide an opportunity to showcase your personality and be more relatable 

How to post a Story to your Facebook page

To post a Facebook story to your business account, you must be the admin or editor of the Page.

Now that you know the benefits stories have for your social media content strategy, let’s go through the step-by-step process of posting a Facebook story on your business page.

During this section, you will learn how to:

1. Post a story from your mobile device 
2. Share your Instagram stories to your Facebook page
3. Post a story from the Socialbee app

1. Share stories by using the mobile Facebook app

The most straightforward way to add a video or photo story to Facebook is by using the Facebook app from your phone. So, let’s quickly go through the process!

Here is how to create a story on the Facebook mobile app:

• Step 1: Open the Facebook app from your phone.
• Step 2: Click Create story above your feed.
• Step 3: Upload photos or videos from your camera roll or create Facebook stories on the spot by clicking the Camera icon from the right top corner. By using Facebook’s in-app camera, you can: take a photo, record a video, make a boomerang, or create a photo collage.
• Step 4: Edit your photo or video story using different Facebook tools: 
  • Add effects, fun filters, text, stickers, music
  • Add custom links
  • Draw 
  • Trim videos
  • Turn videos into boomerangs
  • Add Captions
  • Tag people
• Step 5: Click the “Share” button to make your story on Facebook public.

 

2. Share your Instagram stories to your Facebook page

Sharing your Instagram stories to your Facebook page is a fast and easy way to make the most out of your content while increasing your reach, especially given that the stories format is the same. You can automate this process in just a few minutes and avoid wasting time manually uploading content from one platform to the other.

Here is the simple way to reshare your Instagram story content on Facebook stories:

• Step 1: Make sure you run an Instagram Business account. In case you run a normal account, go to Instagram settings and tap “Switch to Business Profile.”
• Step 2: Open the Meta Accounts Centre in the Instagram settings and link your Facebook and Instagram profiles.
• Step 3: Once your accounts are linked, tap on “Share across profiles.”
• Step 4: Select your Instagram account to “Share from” and Facebook page to “Share to”
• Step 5: In the “Automatically share” section, turn the toggle for “Your Instagram story” on. You can also share your posts and reels.

3. Post Facebook Stories with SocialBee

If you want to use an all-in-one social media management tool for your Facebook strategy, including your stories, then SocialBee is the platform for you. Save time by creating your visuals with the Canva integration and planning your posts in advance with the built-in content calendar.

Here is how you can share Facebook Stories with SocialBee:

1. Open the SocialBee app
2. Click on “Add post” from the top of your screen
3. Once you have entered the Post Editor, make sure to have Facebook selected
4. Click the “Customize for each profile” button
5. Select the type of post you’d like to publish (Feed post, Reel, Story)
6. Upload your Story content
7. Choose a Content Category with a preset schedule for your Story or pick a specific posting time
8. Save your post as “Approved”

How to create a successful Facebook Story

Until now, we managed to cover the basics: 

• What are Facebook stories
• The benefits of using stories as a brand
• How to add stories to your Facebook page

While these factors make up the foundation of your knowledge, there are more aspects you have to learn about Facebook stories in order to be successful in your social media marketing strategy. 

Here are the top five tips for creating a successful Facebook story post:

1. Brainstorm ideas for your Facebook Stories
2. Get creative and experiment with your Stories
3. Focus on video content
4. Post exciting time-sensitive offers
5. Turn your best performing posts into Stories

1. Brainstorm ideas for your Facebook Stories

The most important part of a story is the idea behind it.

Having a comprehensive list of ideas will save you a lot of trouble in the future and will actually help you maintain a consistent posting schedule week after week.

So, what are some great ideas specifically for Facebook stories? Well, as we mentioned before, stories allow you to be more free, fun, and transparent in your approach, which means that you can focus more on interactive content. 

Here is a list of the top 10 ideas on how you can use Facebook stories:

1. Photos/videos from the office
2. Recommendations (books, movies, music, etc)
3. Employee spotlight (allow your audience to get to know your team)
4. Short insightful clips from your events/webinars/podcasts
5. Limited offers
6. Important announcements
7. Holidays and celebrations
8. A sneak peek of a new product/service/event
9. Customer reviews and testimonials
10. Questions

2. Get creative and experiment with your Stories

Ideas are not the only way to get creative with your stories, you can also experiment with your story format.

The key is to pay attention to what works best. Keep track of what content you post as well as the results you get (views, reactions, and replies). Find some patterns and see if a certain type of format appeals to your audience more than others.

Facebook offers quite a few options for content creation and editing, which allows you to:

• Post a photo/video
• Make a boomerang
• Create a photo collage 
• Use the superzoom video effect
• Add stickers, text, effects, music
• Add visual geolocation tags
• Draw on your photos/videos
• Add Captions

3. Focus on video content

TikTok is thriving thanks to its short-form video content format, and Facebook and Instagram see most of their engagement on Reels. All signs point to the fact that you should focus on video in your stories too. 

Here are some video ideas you can try for your next Facebook story:

• Short clips from webinars, events, and live sessions
• Boomerangs from the office
• Clips from online motivational speeches/interviews/documentaries
• Video responses to customer FAQs
• Video testimonials 
• Product videos
• Recorded industry tips

Keep in mind that the maximum Facebook story video length is 20 seconds, so make sure you spend your time creating quality content rather than lengthy videos.

4. Post exciting time-sensitive offers

Do you have exciting promotions and events coming up, but you don’t want to spam your audience with constant updates and reminders? No worries, on stories you can go all out and create buzz around your latest campaigns.

While consecutive promotional posts can lead to several unfollows, when it comes to the story feature, things are different. Since they are short lived, you have more freedom to create anticipation and raise awareness about your sales without appearing too insistent.

Let’s say you run a weekend-long promotion with a 30% discount on a selection of products.

Here is how you can boost your results by using Facebook stories:

1. Create a seven-day countdown and post a sales reminder every day (how many days are left until the promotion begins)
2. Post images with the products on sale
3. Compare old (before discount) and new prices (after discount)
4. During the promotion, you can update your audience on pieces that are being sold out
5. Make posts indicating how much time is left until the promotion ends

5. Turn your best performing posts into Stories

Are you running out of content ideas? Access your social media analytics, identify your top evergreen posts, and turn them into successful stories.

Use a great tool like SocialBee to keep track of your content progress and get all the valuable insights you need to improve your content, such as:

• A top of your most appreciated social media posts
• Best-performing content categories
• The post format with the most results 

From SocialBee’s analytics dashboard you can identify your best performing posts in order to discover the content your audience engages with the most.

Start your free 14-day SocialBee trial!

To make sure your posts perform well as stories too, work on customizing them to the story format by resizing the visuals, cutting out unnecessary text, and adding stickers, emojis, and other effects that can make your content stand out.

Frequently asked questions