Since the release of the "story" feature in 2016, the number of Instagram users has only increased. In fact, it only took a year for these ephemeral videos to become a staple on the social network. Stories have profoundly changed the way people consume information. Over the months, they have become a relevant and powerful format in all Influence Marketing campaigns. What objectives do they meet? How can they be downloaded to optimise the management of these Influence projects? All the answers in this article.
More than 500 million people use or view stories daily. According to eMarketer, Instagram users under 25 years old consult stories 32 minutes a day, while those over 25 years old have a daily average of 24 minutes. A rather small window of action, but one that offers many possibilities including:
Instagram is THE social network of choice for advertisers and marketing professionals. Indeed, stories offer brands the opportunity to offer interesting, immersive and creative content while allowing them to convert their followers into customers in the long term. They have become an integral part of all social media marketing and communication strategies. According to Instagram data, a brand posts about 2.5 stories per week and ⅓ of the most viewed stories come from business accounts. Stories created by brands increased by 21% between Q1 2018 and Q1 2019. This phenomenon proves that the vertical format is a real opportunity for brands to promote their products and services to their target audiences. In 2018, 55.4% of influencers have, in fact, used Instagram stories for their sponsored campaigns.
Evolution of the daily number of users of Instagram stories from October 2016 to January 2019, source Statista
The strategic stakes for companies are indeed colossal, since 2020, stories represent 34% of sponsored content on Instagram. In a study commissioned by Facebook Inc. 62% of respondents said that their interest in a brand or product increased after seeing it in stories. A fact that makes more sense than ever.
In 2020, the average number of posts on influencers’ feeds is 2.3 per week compared to 3.3 in 2016. Why are they publishing less “classic” content? Simply because even though Instagram is a user experience platform, stories were designed specifically for use on mobile. The ephemeral format lowers the stakes for quality and makes posts less formal. The marketing message, whether funny or informative, pushes the community to take action. With the “link” feature recently made available to all accounts, the network encourages even more and faster action.
Stories highlight the spontaneity and authenticity of a brand or an influencer. They are a privileged tool to interact with a community and maintain engagement. They allow a quick exchange, more focused on the message than the form, bringing brands a little closer to their communities. Through stories, professionals offer more transparent content and proximity with their subscribers.
During an Influencer Marketing campaign, a content creator can, for example, explain the development process of a product, or show the behind-the-scenes of the campaign.
The reasons for the collaboration appear more human and transparent. This is important for the community to understand the benefit of a campaign and to buy into the product/service or not. This transparency is generally perceived positively as it promotes trust.
While investing in ephemeral content may seem confusing at first, it is particularly relevant for businesses. Influencers generate higher engagement than content published by brands themselves.
Stories make the user feel part of a community. The ephemeral nature of this type of publication pushes the user to react quickly and encourages conversion. Stories offer many other benefits, which is why brands are increasingly interested in integrating them into their overall Influence strategies. Overall, it should be noted that :
A good Influencer Marketing strategy through stories can generate concrete results:
To maximise the results and performance of an Influencer Marketing project, we strongly advise you to identify the KOL (Key Opinion Leaders) profiles that are most relevant to your brand.
Then, define the most appropriate device to spread your message and reach your strategic objectives, which are also defined well in advance of the campaign launch. If stories are the key format of your Influencer marketing project, the analysis of the community’s engagement rate is essential, as well as other indicators such as the influencer’s target audience (gender, age, interests,…) or his geographical area.
Want to know more about how to identify the most relevant Kolsquare profile(s) for your brand? Discover our article on the subject.
Thanks to its technological solution, Kolsquare allows you to manage your influencer campaigns from the identification to the management of your projects, up to the measurement of the results and performance of each of your Influencer Marketing actions. Stories are a great marketing format for promoting brands.
In order to evaluate the performance of a content creator during an influencer campaign, it is necessary to check all of his publications (posts and stories) individually.
By analysing the performance indicators of past influencer campaigns, brands can understand what worked and what didn’t work with the audience, and use this to create new high-impact operations. To do this, it may be necessary to upload stories to effectively analyse the return on investment of campaigns. Kolsquare allows you to view and save them to :
Our Influencer Marketing technology solution centralises your actions in one place and facilitates the management of your campaigns. You manage all the stories directly in your dedicated dashboard, thus avoiding the need to check them one by one on Instagram.
Note that Kolsquare also updates the stories every 2 hours. They can be updated every 8 hours if you add an influencer to your favorites or to one of your campaigns.
You can export the stories of content creators with whom you have done a campaign by uploading up to 100 stories at a time, in mp4 format. Beyond that, you have the option to export them by day, week or month. In addition, our “stories” filter allows you to identify the number of stories created for each defined period.
Kolsquare’s Platform
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, a data-driven solution that allows brands to scale their KOL Marketing strategies and implement authentic partnerships with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). Kolsquare’s technology enables marketing professionals to easily identify the best Content Creators profiles by filtering their content and audience, and to build and manage their campaigns from A to Z, including measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors. Kolsquare has built the largest community of influencer marketing experts in the world, and offers hundreds of customers (Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, El Corte Inglés, Lacoste, …) the latest Big Data, AI and Machine Learning technologies to drive inspiring partnerships, tapping into an exhaustive network covering 100% of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers in 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. As a Benefit Company, Kolsquare has been pioneering Responsible Influence by championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations to inspire change.
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