Is paid media losing the competition in favor of original content?
You may have noticed that storytelling has become a keyword in digital marketing strategies and the recent launch of new apps from Twitter and Facebook demonstrate the attention being paid by publishers and media towards live journalism and social reporting.
Even for people who are used to making frequent updates on social networks, constantly adding new features, some of them are likely to experience a paradigm shift in the way they approach social networking. One of these changes is the introduction of live storytelling apps, and the way they can be a success factor for companies.
Do you know which apps we are talking about?
Periscope
Once upon a time, there was Meerkat, a third-party app allowing live streaming from Twitter. Then, Twitter quickly realized the usefulness of these features and introduced its own live streaming app, Periscope, which quickly replaced Meerkat in Twitter users’ hearts.
This move has made Twitter more open to storytelling and content as a whole, as its “core business” is limited to 140 characters. Engagement, interactions and experiences should see an increase with Periscope because it is available to all users. Additionally, regarding the development of its storytelling strategy, Twitter is about to launch Project Lightning. This app is designed to concentrate the best tweets, including instantly loading videos and rich images, for trending news and making them visible to both logged-in and logged-out users on various platforms. This app is expected to radically change the way we do (and consume) journalism.
Facebook Mentions
Facebook didn’t waste any time in responding to Twitter’s move and launched Mentions. This platform allows you to have video streaming while simultaneously allowing users and followers to interact with each other and the video. Although Mentions is currently reserved for selected influencers, we expect that Facebook will, sooner or later, extend it to all accounts.
Facebook Signal
Signal is another recent addition to the Facebook app ecosystem. This product is dedicated to journalists and is based on their use of “social signals” to spot trending topics, news, pictures or videos directly from Facebook or Instagram. Signals makes it easier to spot them and join important events that create buzz on the social network. Furthermore, they can embed the content produced by other users directly onto their websites (obviously, crediting the author).
Steller
Speaking with images: visual storytelling isn’t a phenomenon in digital marketing yet but it is on social networks like Pinterest and Instagram, the latter of which highlights the mobile experience as one of the key parts of the customer journey.
Steller is a free visual storytelling App, currently available only on iOS. It creates stories from user’s pictures and videos, with a particular attention to design detail. The user experience is great: the menu is smart, there are design templates and fonts to choose from and with just a few taps amazing stories are created and published.
With the growth of “paid” content, the main social networks and publishing platforms have understood that they need to continue enhancing the user experience in terms of creation and consumption of content – if they want to keep users to show this paid content to.
Brands, here is your next big opportunity and something to consider in your budget!