Storytelling in Social Media

Challenge

Technology development has brought people to the social media era, where people can share any  information they want. Many people took advantages from the fame of this era to show up their self  or even organization for economical and political reasons or just fulfil their esteem or self- actualization need. However, not all people who share information through social media get a good  response from their target audience. In addition, there is also many social media feeds that brings its  creator to hatred or criminal status. Creating interesting, fresh, and worth to be like-content in social  media is truly a big challenge for every content creator in nowadays.

Selection

I took storytelling tool to discuss this case to remind my self if there is a relationship between  audience response for social media feed and the quality of the feed itself. As we all know,  storytelling is a tool to make a piece of information more interesting to listen, to look, and to  understand. Of course, this is not something easy. To do that, someone must have a good  understanding both to their target audience and the information they want to share. Then, they  need to apply their sense of art to transform some “common” information to become new for their  audiences.

Application

We can start to reassess our own social media by clarify our goal to use social media. There is always  an option to stop using social media if there is no intention. However, if we hope to achieve a great  response to our feed, then we can try a new theme in our every new post. To be noted, the content  is assumed to be a fixed variable, so we only think the different way to communicate it. For example,  we want to share a campaign about Black Lives Matter (BLM) that we know is a sensitive issue for  some people. By storytelling, we can communicate any information including BLM issue without  worrying about anything. To do campaign about BLM issue, we can show our best photo, then we  change the skin colour of the photo into several colours, for example black, white, yellow, green, and  purple. Then make a caption like this:

[Black lives matter]  White lives matter  Yellow lives matter  Green lives matter  Purple lives matter  etc lives matter.  There would be no beautiful painting without them.    In that caption, I tell a story about how important different colours to my painting, assumes if I was  an artist. My metaphorical story absolutely brings people who concern to the idea of Black Lives  Matter racial case. This art of communication let people to say something A with the way of B which  is more safe to say, more unique, and more interesting. The other important thing to do in the  storytelling is timing, whether the time coincides with the viral moment, rhythm when  communicating the story, or just the length of the passage (amount of time to understand the  content).

Storytelling is not merely a narrative. The less is more principle is powerful to increase the audience  willingness to read the whole information we share. It is good to make visualization communicate  most of the story and leaving the text to perfect it. The more the audience understand our whole  information without any bias understanding, the more we achieve a response from our target  audience. It is also possible the audience doesn’t give the response soon, but they will aware of our  idea as long as our idea corresponds to their concern.

Insight and Approach

Since I conducted this technique to my social media, I got a good response (more than my  expectation) from my colleagues. Beside of that, I feel I was becoming a smarter person since I need  to think about the new concept to my every new post. However, to apply this tool to the wider scale  of business aim, it needs the better indicator to know whether this technique is really good or no, or  how much the audience response growth due to the implementation of this tool.

