Storylining Part 2: Playing Your Brand in the Social Arena

If the latter part of 2022 has reinforced anything about social media, it’s that people love a good narrative.

Whether it’s watching a rap mogul lose his grip on the fashion industry or following a tycoon’s follies and failures over a blue checkmark on Twitter, it’s in our nature to try to make sense of the nonsensical. In the first of our Storylining series articles, we reveal that our proprietary approach to content strategy is inspired by the analogic facets of the human brain.

Why You Should Have a Social Media Strategy

Popularizing trends as trivial as butter boards and influencing actions as profound as the DOJ’s Ticketmaster investigation, social media is the intersection of culture and commerce — and the epicenter of our curiosity. Yet for marketers, the most valuable offering is social media’s highly-qualified reach at scale —with your audience’s real-time feedback built right in.

The Numbers

There are over 270.1 million social media users in the U.S. alone, equivalent to 80.9 percent of the total population*. Your audience has shown up, yet with new-ish platforms like Mastodon claiming to be the better Twitter, you might be questioning if your brand has a spot in the social arena. We think it does.

What You Do Matters

Brands can help build a better world. They can create impact, ideas, stories and progress. Brands reflect cultural arrival and cultural shift. They can provide tools to help make sense of, and navigate around, our world. And it's Mindstream Interactive's specialty to uncover the stories your audience wants to follow and help build your brand.

Storylining is Strategizing with Intent

Whether you've dipped your toes into organic social content or gone as far as splashing in the paid social media pool, a strategic combination of digital marketing and advertising reveals full-funnel solutions.

Social media amalgamates the properties of paid media platforms, custom webpages, organic communities and influencer networks. The more "everything all at once" social media can be, the more consistent and brand-relative your content needs to be in order to attract your desired audience.

Although Storylining is our proprietary, channel-agnostic technique to develop any project from seasonal campaigns to new brand development, it originated from a need to anchor the numerous social media content calendars (that once existed per platform). Storylining provides a brand-right storytelling strategy ideal for Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn,TikTok and any other platform that may enter the social arena.

A Peek into the Storylining Process

Storylining is our way of teaching your brand to speak "human." Once a KPI is set, we start by translating your brand voice and core identity through your community's digital dialect — assessed from your current metrics, by social listening or a combination of both. From there, we co-collaborate to filter the findings through proprietary framework that tempers the rational with the emotional. Then we're ready for the really fun part: content ideation and creation.

Signs Your Brand Could Benefit from Storylining

• Your social channels feel like a one-way street, with plenty of content being published but low customer engagement.
• Your social feeds are filled with re-posted or shared content.
• More time and effort are invested in content creation than successfully dispensing it.
• Reaching a highly targeted audience could make or break your next effort (lead generation, product launch or converting sales).

As a flexible framework built for brand engagement, Storylining is a method used for B2B and B2C brand strategy development. We help brands do this every day, and original Storylining creation is a passion shared across all our teams: Analytics, Content, Paid Search, Social, UX and Web Dev. Some of our work in this area includes client partnerships with Bob Evans, Visit California, Advanced Drainage Systems and PenFed Credit Union.

To find out how Storylining can help connect your brand to Gen Z, read the next article in the three-part series: Storylining Pt. 3: Shapeshifting in a Gen-Z World.

Get in touch with our team if you’d like to learn more about how to build experiences that foster a human connection to your brand.
 

*However, Facebook restricts the use of its platform to people aged 13 and above, so it's also worth highlighting that 63.7% of the "eligible" audience in the USA uses Facebook in 2022.

Sources:

“Digital 2022: The United States of America”, Data Portal Digital 2022 Global Overview Report, 2022 

“More Than Half of the People on Earth Now Use Social Media”, Hootsuite 2022