#ephemeralcontent

What began as space for the youth to get away from their suddenly social media inclined parents has given birth to a powerful marketing tool. And since Instagram and Facebook “adopted” the ephemeral content format from Snapchat, its user base has gone above and beyond the young and their face filters. In fact, Stories creation and consumption is up to a staggering 842% since early 2016, with nearly 1 billion accounts across Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp creating and watching these fleeting photos and videos. According to Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, the Stories format is expected to surpass feed sharing some time in 2019. And with that big of an audience, the marketing opportunities are virtually infinite. Below is a brief discussion of the benefits of ephemeral content and tips on how to leverage it to boost your brand.

Why Ephemeral Content Has Been Such a Hit

Realness

There’s a reason why user-generated content is also on the rise, and it’s because more and more people are leaning towards authenticity. According to one report, 60% of consumers say content from friends or family influences their purchase decisions. Meanwhile, 86% say authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support. Keeping things on the real is an element that ephemeral content brings, making it resonate the way it has.  

FOMO (Fear of Missing out)

The very nature of content that disappears after a day makes Fear of Missing Out an important component of ephemeral content. It could be a flash sale, a behind-the-scenes look at an event, or teasers for upcoming releases. Whatever it may be, the fleeting nature of ephemeral content motivates people to actively seek it, as not doing so could leave them out of the loop. Source: https://www.mondovo.com

YOLO (You Only Live Once)

Users just feel more comfortable posting raw content on their Stories. There’s no pressure to come up with the perfect shot (as they would normally aim for in their feeds). And it’s this rawness that makes ephemeral content appealing to both create and consume.

Benefits of Using Ephemeral Content for Your Brand

Authenticity

Because people are increasingly trusting their peers more than they do with brands, ephemeral content presents a great opportunity for the latter to humanize themselves. Because Stories, by nature, are rawer – it provides brands with the platform to present themselves in a more authentic way, ultimately making them more relatable.

Better Engagement

This authenticity helps build genuine, and if you so choose, quite personal relationships between brands and followers - making it a magnet for engagement. And with the engagement features platforms like Instagram continually introduce (question and poll stickers, swipe up feature, and searchable hashtags), users have every reason to engage with brands’ Stories.

Source: https://blog.rebrandly.com

Wider Reach

Try this on your own Stories, tag a popular brand like, say, GoPro when you post content shot using their product and add a related hashtag to boot. See how that skyrockets your views from its usual number. As well, because Stories are on top of Facebook and Instagram’s feeds (even re-appearing in the middle), it’s easier for more people to see your content.

Higher Content Volume

Ephemeral content forces you to either create new content or re-purpose existing ones for the format. This high content volume helps you reinforce messaging and stay on users’ top of mind. And with a creative ephemeral content strategy, you can even streamline content creation and distribution at an even higher rate.

Traffic and Conversion

Source: https://blog.rebrandly.com According to one infographic, up to 25% of Story viewers swipe up to follow a link and engage directly with a brand’s website. This is why 59% of brands take users to a shoppable page with their Stories. The CTA to swipe up, the 15 seconds (max) they have to decide, and the innately engaging nature of ephemeral content makes it an ideal format to utilize for boosting traffic and conversion.  

How to Leverage Ephemeral Content for Your Brand

Capture Your Audience’s Attention

Source: https://webcdn-adespressoinc.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Animated-GIF-downsized.gif You only have a split second to catch users’ attention before they tap on to the next Story so you need to make it as eye-catching as possible. In the example above, Daily Harvest uses a series of rapid images accompanied by simple enough messaging and CTA to instantly grab users’ attention. If you’re posting a pre-produced video, make it as fast-paced as possible, opening with quick flashy clips followed by brief scenes. Or, you can keep it real simple like the example below. Everyone likes to “WIN,” so opening up with that will surely get their attention.

Source: https://adespresso.com

Tell a Story

It’s called Stories for a reason, and that’s because it works best when you tell one. Instead of posting just any random collection of ephemeral content, hook your audiences with a series of Stories that tell one story (messaging or CTA). A great way to go about this is to tug at people’s emotions. Emotions are central to stories, so making your audiences experience strong emotions with your Stories can elevate your content from being merely temporary, to truly transformative. Whether it’s inspiring, or laugh out loud hilarious, aim to create stories that can leave lasting impressions before it disappears.

Humanize Your Brand (and Have Fun)

As alluded to earlier, Stories are a great way to humanize brands and make them more relatable. By giving audiences an inside look at things like a company party or a CSR activity, you can give a face and a personality to your brand. For example, the adventure may be the farthest thing on your mind when you think about GE, but by posting stories during product shoots, and product development, they’re able to make electronic products more human.

Source: https://voymedia.com

Tell Them What to Do

Often, the way to get what you want is to simply ask. This is why having a clear call to action is crucial to effectively leverage the power of ephemeral content.

Source: https://webcdn-adespressoinc.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Animated-GIF-downsized-5.gif Whether it’s telling them to swipe up to get to a landing page, follow an event account to stay updated, or creating user-generated content, simply (but compellingly) telling users what to do should be part of your ephemeral content strategy.

Let Them Take over

Letting influencers take over your Stories is an excellent way to tap into their own audience. Just make sure that the influencers you tap complement your niche. For example, if you’re a sports apparel brand, letting a fitness influencer take over your Stories while giving audiences a BTS look at your event can create ample buzz for your brand.

Source: https://blog.rebrandly.com And you don’t even have to limit yourself to influencers similar to what GE did when they let a contest winner take over their IG account.

Post Regularly to Showcase Your Brand

You’re not always going to come up with a winning formula for your Stories, so you need to post regularly to find out what works. You can follow all the best practices from other brands and personalities, but if they don’t resonate with your own audience, then it’ll be all for naught. As well, you have an assortment of content types to choose from with which you can showcase your brand and products. Be it product demos, tutorials, release announcements, and flash sales - you have plenty of reasons to keep posting Stories.   Additionally, since Stories are always on top of feeds and even autoplay, posting regularly affords you with a chance to get your brand in front of eyeballs consistently.

Takeaway

Conventional wisdom dictates that in order for a piece of marketing content to be effective, it should be presented to the audience on multiple occasions over a long period of time. Otherwise, there is a good chance that consumers will simply forget about your brand. Especially if they have yet to interact with it in some meaningful way. From this perspective, ephemeral marketing content doesn’t seem to make much sense. Why would you want to create promotional material that will definitely disappear after a short while? And yet, ephemeral content is one of the hottest trends in digital marketing today. Instagram is leading the pack with its Stories feature. It is used by more than 400 million people each day. Followed by its parent company Facebook with a Stories feature of its own (300 million daily active users, Messenger Stories included). And finally Snapchat, the company that started the trend, but has since fallen behind its two main competitors (180+ million daily active users). The bottom line is, the demand for ephemeral content is at an all-time high. And it will continue to increase for the foreseeable future. If you wish to leverage the popularity of ephemeral content for promotional purposes, check out our guide on the topic in the rest of this article.

Cost-effective Content Creation

Creating video material for marketing purposes used to be quite expensive unless you had an in-house video marketing department (a privilege reserved for large corporations), you had to pay for the recording equipment, hire a filming crew and actors, and rent the appropriate space to shoot the material. Today, smartphones come with cameras that rival professional equipment in terms of the quality you get for your investment. As a result, the costs of recording video are at an all-time low. What this means is that all kinds of videos are now cheaper to produce, especially ephemeral ones. And since the latter is currently in high demand, creating ephemeral marketing video content is now a worthwhile investment. To put it simply, a video can recover its production costs (and potentially make a profit on top of that) even if it's only available for 24 hours. That said, there is no reason not to use them for marketing.

Leveraging the Fear of Missing Out

Why is ephemeral content popular in the first place? Part of it is due to the subject matter it frequently covers, which we will examine in the following sections. But more importantly, ephemeral content is popular because it tends to trigger a reaction known as the “fear of missing out”, a key concept from marketing psychology. In layman terms, FOMO is the feeling you get when you start to think that others are taking part in something enjoyable while you are not around. And since the ephemeral content is perishable by definition, if you miss out on it, there is no going back. From a marketing perspective, this means that ephemeral content is more likely to produce intense curiosity and desire in consumers. Because they know they only have a short while to check it out, they don’t want to be left out of the conversation. Video production marketing agencies are aware of the importance of FOMO. This is one of the reasons why we are seeing more ephemeral video content on the market. If you want to see how the experts in this field get the job done, browse through this list of renowned video production companies and pick up a couple of tricks.

Providing Authenticity

What makes consumers not willing to miss out on ephemeral content, besides wanting to be in the loop regarding online trends? The quality of the ephemeral content itself, or more specifically the way it feels. And the feelings that ephemeral content is likely to elicit is that of authenticity. Simply put, ephemeral content looks and feels rougher around the edges than other content, which makes it more relatable to the average consumer online. Slick, well shot, and well-edited videos might cause the audience to gasp in amazement. But they are also clear giveaways that the video in question is professionally produced. Therefore it's made with commercial gain in mind, which is why it might come off as disingenuous. Ephemeral content, on the other hand, looks like something an average person can make on their own. And they are more likely to judge it favorably.

Offering a Look Behind the Scenes

The other reason why ephemeral content is so desirable is that it often portrays its producers in a more down-to-earth light. Video marketing content is often perceived as a corporate product, whereas ephemeral content is more likely to be judged as the work of an individual or a group of individuals. In fact, ephemeral content is used precisely for this purpose. That is to give a kind of behind-the-scenes look into the working lives of the people behind the company. The same kind of approach can be applied to the products and services you are offering. We also use ephemeral content to show how a given service works in practice, or how we assemble a product. The content of this sort will go a long way to show your brand in a positive light. And it will portray you as a company that values transparency and customer satisfaction.

Cultivating User Engagement

Another feature that makes ephemeral content marketing an attractive proposal for businesses is its ability to foster engagement and participation. In fact, your ephemeral content marketing strategy can work on auto-pilot if you manage to gather a critical mass of engaged users. Why is ephemeral content so engaging? Because its limited time-frame of existence will drive people to take action, such as clicking on a link, purchasing a product, or subscribing to a newsletter. One particularly clever way to leverage this is to run a contest for creating ephemeral content. Simply give your audience an incentive in the form of a gift item, a discount, or something similar. Then ask them to create an image or a video that somehow involves your brand, services, or products. By doing this, you can improve your social media engagement rate, while acquiring ephemeral content. You can use these ephemeral content on your channel at a very low cost.

Conclusion

What began as space for the youth to get away from their suddenly social media inclined parents has given birth to a powerful marketing tool. And since Instagram and Facebook “adopted” the ephemeral content format from Snapchat, its user base has gone above and beyond the young and their face filters. In fact, Stories creation and consumption is up to a staggering 842% since early 2016, with nearly 1 billion accounts across Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp creating and watching these fleeting photos and videos. According to Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, the Stories format is expected to surpass feed sharing some time in 2019. And with that big of an audience, the marketing opportunities are virtually infinite. Below is a brief discussion of the benefits of ephemeral content and tips on how to leverage it to boost your brand.

Why Ephemeral Content Has Been Such a Hit

Realness

There’s a reason why user-generated content is also on the rise, and it’s because more and more people are leaning towards authenticity. According to one report, 60% of consumers say content from friends or family influences their purchase decisions. Meanwhile, 86% say authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support. Keeping things on the real is an element that ephemeral content brings, making it resonate the way it has.  

FOMO (Fear of Missing out)

The very nature of content that disappears after a day makes Fear of Missing Out an important component of ephemeral content. It could be a flash sale, a behind-the-scenes look at an event, or teasers for upcoming releases. Whatever it may be, the fleeting nature of ephemeral content motivates people to actively seek it, as not doing so could leave them out of the loop. Source: https://www.mondovo.com

YOLO (You Only Live Once)

Users just feel more comfortable posting raw content on their Stories. There’s no pressure to come up with the perfect shot (as they would normally aim for in their feeds). And it’s this rawness that makes ephemeral content appealing to both create and consume.

Benefits of Using Ephemeral Content for Your Brand

Authenticity

Because people are increasingly trusting their peers more than they do with brands, ephemeral content presents a great opportunity for the latter to humanize themselves. Because Stories, by nature, are rawer – it provides brands with the platform to present themselves in a more authentic way, ultimately making them more relatable.

Better Engagement

This authenticity helps build genuine, and if you so choose, quite personal relationships between brands and followers - making it a magnet for engagement. And with the engagement features platforms like Instagram continually introduce (question and poll stickers, swipe up feature, and searchable hashtags), users have every reason to engage with brands’ Stories.

Source: https://blog.rebrandly.com

Wider Reach

Try this on your own Stories, tag a popular brand like, say, GoPro when you post content shot using their product and add a related hashtag to boot. See how that skyrockets your views from its usual number. As well, because Stories are on top of Facebook and Instagram’s feeds (even re-appearing in the middle), it’s easier for more people to see your content.

Higher Content Volume

Ephemeral content forces you to either create new content or re-purpose existing ones for the format. This high content volume helps you reinforce messaging and stay on users’ top of mind. And with a creative ephemeral content strategy, you can even streamline content creation and distribution at an even higher rate.

Traffic and Conversion

Source: https://blog.rebrandly.com According to one infographic, up to 25% of Story viewers swipe up to follow a link and engage directly with a brand’s website. This is why 59% of brands take users to a shoppable page with their Stories. The CTA to swipe up, the 15 seconds (max) they have to decide, and the innately engaging nature of ephemeral content makes it an ideal format to utilize for boosting traffic and conversion.  

How to Leverage Ephemeral Content for Your Brand

Capture Your Audience’s Attention

Source: https://webcdn-adespressoinc.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Animated-GIF-downsized.gif You only have a split second to catch users’ attention before they tap on to the next Story so you need to make it as eye-catching as possible. In the example above, Daily Harvest uses a series of rapid images accompanied by simple enough messaging and CTA to instantly grab users’ attention. If you’re posting a pre-produced video, make it as fast-paced as possible, opening with quick flashy clips followed by brief scenes. Or, you can keep it real simple like the example below. Everyone likes to “WIN,” so opening up with that will surely get their attention.

Source: https://adespresso.com

Tell a Story

It’s called Stories for a reason, and that’s because it works best when you tell one. Instead of posting just any random collection of ephemeral content, hook your audiences with a series of Stories that tell one story (messaging or CTA). A great way to go about this is to tug at people’s emotions. Emotions are central to stories, so making your audiences experience strong emotions with your Stories can elevate your content from being merely temporary, to truly transformative. Whether it’s inspiring, or laugh out loud hilarious, aim to create stories that can leave lasting impressions before it disappears.

Humanize Your Brand (and Have Fun)

As alluded to earlier, Stories are a great way to humanize brands and make them more relatable. By giving audiences an inside look at things like a company party or a CSR activity, you can give a face and a personality to your brand. For example, the adventure may be the farthest thing on your mind when you think about GE, but by posting stories during product shoots, and product development, they’re able to make electronic products more human.

Source: https://voymedia.com

Tell Them What to Do

Often, the way to get what you want is to simply ask. This is why having a clear call to action is crucial to effectively leverage the power of ephemeral content.

Source: https://webcdn-adespressoinc.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Animated-GIF-downsized-5.gif Whether it’s telling them to swipe up to get to a landing page, follow an event account to stay updated, or creating user-generated content, simply (but compellingly) telling users what to do should be part of your ephemeral content strategy.

Let Them Take over

Letting influencers take over your Stories is an excellent way to tap into their own audience. Just make sure that the influencers you tap complement your niche. For example, if you’re a sports apparel brand, letting a fitness influencer take over your Stories while giving audiences a BTS look at your event can create ample buzz for your brand.

Source: https://blog.rebrandly.com And you don’t even have to limit yourself to influencers similar to what GE did when they let a contest winner take over their IG account.

Post Regularly to Showcase Your Brand

You’re not always going to come up with a winning formula for your Stories, so you need to post regularly to find out what works. You can follow all the best practices from other brands and personalities, but if they don’t resonate with your own audience, then it’ll be all for naught. As well, you have an assortment of content types to choose from with which you can showcase your brand and products. Be it product demos, tutorials, release announcements, and flash sales - you have plenty of reasons to keep posting Stories.   Additionally, since Stories are always on top of feeds and even autoplay, posting regularly affords you with a chance to get your brand in front of eyeballs consistently.

Takeaway

Conventional wisdom dictates that in order for a piece of marketing content to be effective, it should be presented to the audience on multiple occasions over a long period of time. Otherwise, there is a good chance that consumers will simply forget about your brand. Especially if they have yet to interact with it in some meaningful way. From this perspective, ephemeral marketing content doesn’t seem to make much sense. Why would you want to create promotional material that will definitely disappear after a short while? And yet, ephemeral content is one of the hottest trends in digital marketing today. Instagram is leading the pack with its Stories feature. It is used by more than 400 million people each day. Followed by its parent company Facebook with a Stories feature of its own (300 million daily active users, Messenger Stories included). And finally Snapchat, the company that started the trend, but has since fallen behind its two main competitors (180+ million daily active users). The bottom line is, the demand for ephemeral content is at an all-time high. And it will continue to increase for the foreseeable future. If you wish to leverage the popularity of ephemeral content for promotional purposes, check out our guide on the topic in the rest of this article.

Cost-effective Content Creation

Creating video material for marketing purposes used to be quite expensive unless you had an in-house video marketing department (a privilege reserved for large corporations), you had to pay for the recording equipment, hire a filming crew and actors, and rent the appropriate space to shoot the material. Today, smartphones come with cameras that rival professional equipment in terms of the quality you get for your investment. As a result, the costs of recording video are at an all-time low. What this means is that all kinds of videos are now cheaper to produce, especially ephemeral ones. And since the latter is currently in high demand, creating ephemeral marketing video content is now a worthwhile investment. To put it simply, a video can recover its production costs (and potentially make a profit on top of that) even if it's only available for 24 hours. That said, there is no reason not to use them for marketing.

Leveraging the Fear of Missing Out

Why is ephemeral content popular in the first place? Part of it is due to the subject matter it frequently covers, which we will examine in the following sections. But more importantly, ephemeral content is popular because it tends to trigger a reaction known as the “fear of missing out”, a key concept from marketing psychology. In layman terms, FOMO is the feeling you get when you start to think that others are taking part in something enjoyable while you are not around. And since the ephemeral content is perishable by definition, if you miss out on it, there is no going back. From a marketing perspective, this means that ephemeral content is more likely to produce intense curiosity and desire in consumers. Because they know they only have a short while to check it out, they don’t want to be left out of the conversation. Video production marketing agencies are aware of the importance of FOMO. This is one of the reasons why we are seeing more ephemeral video content on the market. If you want to see how the experts in this field get the job done, browse through this list of renowned video production companies and pick up a couple of tricks.

Providing Authenticity

What makes consumers not willing to miss out on ephemeral content, besides wanting to be in the loop regarding online trends? The quality of the ephemeral content itself, or more specifically the way it feels. And the feelings that ephemeral content is likely to elicit is that of authenticity. Simply put, ephemeral content looks and feels rougher around the edges than other content, which makes it more relatable to the average consumer online. Slick, well shot, and well-edited videos might cause the audience to gasp in amazement. But they are also clear giveaways that the video in question is professionally produced. Therefore it's made with commercial gain in mind, which is why it might come off as disingenuous. Ephemeral content, on the other hand, looks like something an average person can make on their own. And they are more likely to judge it favorably.

Offering a Look Behind the Scenes

The other reason why ephemeral content is so desirable is that it often portrays its producers in a more down-to-earth light. Video marketing content is often perceived as a corporate product, whereas ephemeral content is more likely to be judged as the work of an individual or a group of individuals. In fact, ephemeral content is used precisely for this purpose. That is to give a kind of behind-the-scenes look into the working lives of the people behind the company. The same kind of approach can be applied to the products and services you are offering. We also use ephemeral content to show how a given service works in practice, or how we assemble a product. The content of this sort will go a long way to show your brand in a positive light. And it will portray you as a company that values transparency and customer satisfaction.

Cultivating User Engagement

Another feature that makes ephemeral content marketing an attractive proposal for businesses is its ability to foster engagement and participation. In fact, your ephemeral content marketing strategy can work on auto-pilot if you manage to gather a critical mass of engaged users. Why is ephemeral content so engaging? Because its limited time-frame of existence will drive people to take action, such as clicking on a link, purchasing a product, or subscribing to a newsletter. One particularly clever way to leverage this is to run a contest for creating ephemeral content. Simply give your audience an incentive in the form of a gift item, a discount, or something similar. Then ask them to create an image or a video that somehow involves your brand, services, or products. By doing this, you can improve your social media engagement rate, while acquiring ephemeral content. You can use these ephemeral content on your channel at a very low cost.

Conclusion

What began as space for the youth to get away from their suddenly social media inclined parents has given birth to a powerful marketing tool. And since Instagram and Facebook “adopted” the ephemeral content format from Snapchat, its user base has gone above and beyond the young and their face filters. In fact, Stories creation and consumption is up to a staggering 842% since early 2016, with nearly 1 billion accounts across Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp creating and watching these fleeting photos and videos. According to Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, the Stories format is expected to surpass feed sharing some time in 2019. And with that big of an audience, the marketing opportunities are virtually infinite. Below is a brief discussion of the benefits of ephemeral content and tips on how to leverage it to boost your brand.

Why Ephemeral Content Has Been Such a Hit

Realness

There’s a reason why user-generated content is also on the rise, and it’s because more and more people are leaning towards authenticity. According to one report, 60% of consumers say content from friends or family influences their purchase decisions. Meanwhile, 86% say authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support. Keeping things on the real is an element that ephemeral content brings, making it resonate the way it has.  

FOMO (Fear of Missing out)

The very nature of content that disappears after a day makes Fear of Missing Out an important component of ephemeral content. It could be a flash sale, a behind-the-scenes look at an event, or teasers for upcoming releases. Whatever it may be, the fleeting nature of ephemeral content motivates people to actively seek it, as not doing so could leave them out of the loop. Source: https://www.mondovo.com

YOLO (You Only Live Once)

Users just feel more comfortable posting raw content on their Stories. There’s no pressure to come up with the perfect shot (as they would normally aim for in their feeds). And it’s this rawness that makes ephemeral content appealing to both create and consume.

Benefits of Using Ephemeral Content for Your Brand

Authenticity

Because people are increasingly trusting their peers more than they do with brands, ephemeral content presents a great opportunity for the latter to humanize themselves. Because Stories, by nature, are rawer – it provides brands with the platform to present themselves in a more authentic way, ultimately making them more relatable.

Better Engagement

This authenticity helps build genuine, and if you so choose, quite personal relationships between brands and followers - making it a magnet for engagement. And with the engagement features platforms like Instagram continually introduce (question and poll stickers, swipe up feature, and searchable hashtags), users have every reason to engage with brands’ Stories.

Source: https://blog.rebrandly.com

Wider Reach

Try this on your own Stories, tag a popular brand like, say, GoPro when you post content shot using their product and add a related hashtag to boot. See how that skyrockets your views from its usual number. As well, because Stories are on top of Facebook and Instagram’s feeds (even re-appearing in the middle), it’s easier for more people to see your content.

Higher Content Volume

Ephemeral content forces you to either create new content or re-purpose existing ones for the format. This high content volume helps you reinforce messaging and stay on users’ top of mind. And with a creative ephemeral content strategy, you can even streamline content creation and distribution at an even higher rate.

Traffic and Conversion

Source: https://blog.rebrandly.com According to one infographic, up to 25% of Story viewers swipe up to follow a link and engage directly with a brand’s website. This is why 59% of brands take users to a shoppable page with their Stories. The CTA to swipe up, the 15 seconds (max) they have to decide, and the innately engaging nature of ephemeral content makes it an ideal format to utilize for boosting traffic and conversion.  

How to Leverage Ephemeral Content for Your Brand

Capture Your Audience’s Attention

Source: https://webcdn-adespressoinc.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Animated-GIF-downsized.gif You only have a split second to catch users’ attention before they tap on to the next Story so you need to make it as eye-catching as possible. In the example above, Daily Harvest uses a series of rapid images accompanied by simple enough messaging and CTA to instantly grab users’ attention. If you’re posting a pre-produced video, make it as fast-paced as possible, opening with quick flashy clips followed by brief scenes. Or, you can keep it real simple like the example below. Everyone likes to “WIN,” so opening up with that will surely get their attention.

Source: https://adespresso.com

Tell a Story

It’s called Stories for a reason, and that’s because it works best when you tell one. Instead of posting just any random collection of ephemeral content, hook your audiences with a series of Stories that tell one story (messaging or CTA). A great way to go about this is to tug at people’s emotions. Emotions are central to stories, so making your audiences experience strong emotions with your Stories can elevate your content from being merely temporary, to truly transformative. Whether it’s inspiring, or laugh out loud hilarious, aim to create stories that can leave lasting impressions before it disappears.

Humanize Your Brand (and Have Fun)

As alluded to earlier, Stories are a great way to humanize brands and make them more relatable. By giving audiences an inside look at things like a company party or a CSR activity, you can give a face and a personality to your brand. For example, the adventure may be the farthest thing on your mind when you think about GE, but by posting stories during product shoots, and product development, they’re able to make electronic products more human.

Source: https://voymedia.com

Tell Them What to Do

Often, the way to get what you want is to simply ask. This is why having a clear call to action is crucial to effectively leverage the power of ephemeral content.

Source: https://webcdn-adespressoinc.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Animated-GIF-downsized-5.gif Whether it’s telling them to swipe up to get to a landing page, follow an event account to stay updated, or creating user-generated content, simply (but compellingly) telling users what to do should be part of your ephemeral content strategy.

Let Them Take over

Letting influencers take over your Stories is an excellent way to tap into their own audience. Just make sure that the influencers you tap complement your niche. For example, if you’re a sports apparel brand, letting a fitness influencer take over your Stories while giving audiences a BTS look at your event can create ample buzz for your brand.

Source: https://blog.rebrandly.com And you don’t even have to limit yourself to influencers similar to what GE did when they let a contest winner take over their IG account.

Post Regularly to Showcase Your Brand

You’re not always going to come up with a winning formula for your Stories, so you need to post regularly to find out what works. You can follow all the best practices from other brands and personalities, but if they don’t resonate with your own audience, then it’ll be all for naught. As well, you have an assortment of content types to choose from with which you can showcase your brand and products. Be it product demos, tutorials, release announcements, and flash sales - you have plenty of reasons to keep posting Stories.   Additionally, since Stories are always on top of feeds and even autoplay, posting regularly affords you with a chance to get your brand in front of eyeballs consistently.

Takeaway