There are nearly five billion social media users globally. While this number presents an amazing and sizable market opportunity, it doesn’t come without its challenges. In our day and age, users are increasingly seeking content that’s valuable, engaging, and immersive.

And nothing quite achieves this goal than through the art of social media storytelling. When a user is interested in your story, they’re more likely to engage with your content. This is where swipe-worthy content comes in. Swipe-worthy content is content that is so good and intriguing that your audience wants to take action.

This can mean swiping for more information, swiping to see your next piece, swiping as a form of liking your content and so much more. Now that you know the definition and importance of swipe-worthy content, let’s take a closer look at how to create it and the best practices for engaging social media storytelling.

Tips for Creating Swipe-Worthy Content

Do you want your audience and users to engage with your content? If you answered “yes”, that means you need to deliver. There are several tips that you can use to achieve this goal. Here’s what we recommend:

Offer consistently engaging visual content

Marketers should never underestimate the power of visual content. This includes videos, creatives that feature elements of design and copy, images/photos, text-heavy content (that’s well-written), and a whole lot more. Strong visual content on social media is the fundamental driving force of engagement.

Get it wrong and you risk alienating your audience. Get it right and you have a loyal follower base that you can tap into. However, it requires consistent efforts, being true to your brand voice, and a certain level of ingenuity to make your content swipe-worthy.

In addition to this, your content should have clear calls-to-action (CTAs) with well-sized buttons and actionable steps that the user can take. You can also add more valuable information through additional links that you insert within your content.

And naturally, you want to be respectful of your audience and ensure that your visual elements align with your brand identity and business vision as well as the goals you are aiming to achieve. For this reason, it is necessary to carve out your ideal buyer persona and know exactly who it is that you are targeting with your visual content so that it is relevant to them and drives engagement.

Save inspirational content in a swipe file

A big part of creating visually engaging content for social media as part of your storytelling journey is looking for and finding inspiration. You may be inspired by certain texts, visuals, videos, or all three for future use. However, it’s easy to forget where you sourced your ideas from if you don’t keep track of them.

This is where social media swipe files come in quite handy. Think of swipe files like a folder of inspiration. It’s where you keep all the “good stuff”. It’s somewhere you can always go back to when the need arises and it’s something you can continuously contribute to whenever you see something worth emulating.

It’s a balance between staying relevant and fresh while drawing inspiration for your next storytelling escapade where you can introduce dynamic personalization as you tap into subcultures whose loyalty you can develop over time.

Remember that you don’t always need to create visual content or ideas for it from scratch. Being inspired by others by borrowing from them aspects that work is another important strategy of saving you time and always keeping your content relevant to your audience.

Utilize interactive features

Many social media platforms have interactive features, such as the swipe tools on TikTok to take you to the next video. And as the age of swiping on social media advances and becomes more intuitive, it’s only natural that you’d want swipe-worthy content.

Be it a carousel or a video, a visual or an image, getting your users to take the desired swiping action is your ultimate goal. For this purpose, you need to make sure that you use these interactive features to their fullest potential.

This means deeply understanding how each platform works and what the mechanics behind swiping are. It also means tailoring your content to your audience so that they’re inspired to consume more from your brand.

Here, you can be as creative as you like given your availability of resources. Just make sure to keep those best practices mentioned earlier in mind. Namely, staying in touch with your brand’s voice, visual identity, and vision.

Best Practices for Engaging Social Media Storytelling

Having the basics in place for your swipe-worthy content, it’s time to get involved in storytelling — a powerful way to attract and retain your followers’ interest and attention.

Consistency and authenticity

Storytelling isn’t a once-off event. It’s a series of events reflected in your content that can entice, tease, and intrigue your audience to discover more or explore your offering further. We are not talking about clickbait articles that over-promise and don’t deliver.

We are talking about adding value at every step of the way. It’s about a consistent approach to storytelling where your brand’s authentic voice shines through in a strong way every time you post something, irrespective of content type, platform, or medium.

The importance of consistency in driving social media engagement is essential for your efforts. Your followers need to know that they can count on you to deliver. Alternatively, you risk alienating them and damaging both your brand voice and their trust in your brand.

Audience engagement

There are several key ways to engage your followers and audience. But the first one starts with deeply researching who you are targeting, studying your competitors, and doing your research.

After this, you want to create your social media aesthetic that you’ll use in the future. You then want to segment your content for each social media channel and prioritize social media in your communications strategy.

Once these basics are in place and you’ve chosen the right platforms, created a posting schedule, and have a social media platform strategy in place, you are ready to begin.

Here are just a few of the ways you can begin engaging your followers more effectively:

• Consider influencers and share influencer content
• Share your inspiring stories and don’t forget to use hashtags
• Create compelling content
• Post photos and videos
• Arouse curiosity by hosting a contest, giveaways, asking questions, and posting polls

AI customer service can also play a significant role in improving user engagement and satisfaction.

Also, if you are creating email campaigns for your customers, make sure you are using an SPF record checker to authorize and protect your email domains from phishing.

Don’t forget to optimize your social media profiles and to engage with your audience when they engage with you. This means being responsive to their comments, questions, and suggestions so that you are constantly considering their responses as a type of feedback loop that helps you consistently improve your social media storytelling strategy.

Event promotion

Although we briefly touched on hosting contests or giveaways, there’s another category that requires a separate discussion. This is promoting events. Whether it’s a webinar, an online sale, a giveaway, a fun competition, or anything in between, you need to arouse curiosity and drive action.

Make sure the incentives you offer for participation are worth it. Try to sprinkle some influencer magic on your event promotion efforts as well. Finally, be clear with your audience about what they can expect to avoid disappointing them.

And don’t make the contests or event promotion efforts too difficult for your audience to participate in. Make it relatively simple to sign up and enter and have clear terms and conditions for solid and unambiguous expectations.

Conclusion

Creating swipe-worthy content is both an art and a science and it involves knowing your audience extremely well so that you can tailor your content to them in the most effective way possible.

Once you’ve got a clear audience segmentation outlined, it’s time to start sharing your story. Following the tips and best practices outlined here will help you achieve better results, stronger audience engagement, and overall, better results for your business.