TELLING STORIES WITH YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS USING GOOGLE CAROUSEL ADS

A few weeks back, we were discussing how SnapChat can be utilized as part of a youth-oriented social media marketing campaign and one aspect that we highlighted is the ability in SnapChat to tell stories: extended internet narratives that last up to 24 hours.

While the concept of using social media to tell a story might sound foreign to those who rely primarily on Facebook and Twitter, the power of a strong narrative has always resonated with social media. After all, some of the most successful marketing campaigns have essentially told a story across a variety of platforms. The band Daft Punk essentially turned the release of their last record into an extended story, slowly building up the myth of the record and filling in audiences with crucial bits of information via original videos and articles.

It’s within this narrative-friendly environment that forward-thinking advertisers on Facebook and Instagram are taking advantage of Google’s new carousel ads. Based on the similar search function in which users can scroll through a slideshow of different search results, the new carousel ads have so far largely been used by ecommerce companies to highlight certain producets.

However, the carousel ads also provide a novel way for advertisers to tell stories about their brands and products. And like any good story, the first rule of storytelling is grabbing the user’s attention, in this case, with a strong image.

In selecting a first image, make sure your users know what they’re getting and include imagery that reflects your brand. In addition, in storytelling it’s important to keep the reader engaged all the way to the end of the story. Thus, after hooking the viewer’s interest with the first image, keep them engaged with your follow-up images, with a payoff promised for the end.

It’s also important to think sequentially when creating the Google Carousel Ads so that each image plays into the next, creating a story the reader will want to follow until the end. And like any story that you never want to put down, always leave your audience wanting more.

While this is still a new means of advertising being offered by Google, by thinking in terms of storytelling, social media marketers will start to see an improvement in engagement across all of their social media efforts while also standing out from the crowd on social media.