Before starting, I guess we all can agree that everyone likes suspense. It will never be a zero-one question but on some level or degree, we all seem to enjoy it. The suspense keeps us engaged and we all want to be engaged to something (one may agree or not).
Before 2010, when anybody would have heard this word “Story”, they would have thought of some old grandma story or any favorite novel whose story you can’t forget. But from the starting of last decade, we have some different kinds of stories when Snapchat got launched. Initiating an idea of sharing your life stories in a 24-hour manner, Snapchat experimented this psychological engagement with their users but now every social media has it. This shows how successful this experiment is.
The name ‘Stories’ is a little misleading, as these aren’t actually actual stories. They are a little weird compared to regular content, any stories you post aren’t around forever! Twenty-four hours after posting, the stories automatically delete themselves. This is what makes stories a little more unique than regular status updates – their lack of permanence means they fit a different niche than normal updates.
In a 2018 Stratechery article, Ben Thompson observed that when it comes to Stories, timing is everything. He wrote –
‘Part of what makes Stories such fantastic drivers of engagement is the combination of their disappearing nature — better check frequently to not miss anything! — combined with the simple mechanic of viewing them: tap tap tap.’
It is already known that real-time social media viewed in the present moment increases consumption (consumption is an act of passive viewing) and interestingly, real-time media did not have the same effect on interaction and creation. This is tricky for marketers. There are always more updates to watch, and it’s so easy to just tap away from your brand’s content without interacting with it.
That’s, how they generate revenue in fact, when you are just tapping and tapping to change the story, there would be a customized add from any brand in the form of story and you would never know how that product is inside your mind without you specifically searching for it. The lesson with real-time marketing is to not sweat it if conversions don’t directly correlate with Stories’ views right away. It’s a gradual process.
If Stories make you feel like you’re snooping on the lives of others, well, you are. But you can blame your DNA. Yuval Noah Harari discusses the evolutionary theory of gossip in an early chapter of his book ‘Sapiens’:
‘Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bisons. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest and who is a cheat.’
It’s all related to our code (our DNA) as we crave fatty, calorie-rich foods as if we were still in hunter-gatherer bands, we crave gossip as a survival tactic. A study has shown how social media use gives us gratification from both voyeurism and exhibitionism. The key observation was that on social media platforms, one gratification could not exist without the other. The researchers described it as “a two-sided market”. We wouldn’t reap the same neural rewards if we could only view content and not post it, or vice versa. This is a valuable lesson about what you’re offering to your audience in your Stories transaction. If you want to reward their voyeuristic senses, then make your Stories about access to people, places, and experiences that viewers might otherwise not have.
There is one more side of it i.e. Time based importance. How it works is that if you are using your limited time on someone, then you must like them at least somewhat (this is what your subconscious tells you) so then you actually begin to like them more.
This is similar to the Benjamin Franklin Effect, where by asking someone to do small favors for you they begin to think that they like you because if they didn’t like you they wouldn’t be doing those favors for you according to their brain.
So pretty much by posting your pictures on social media stories, people spend some amount of their time looking at it and thus believe that they like you more, giving social benefit. This may or may not be true with everyone but that small five to ten seconds on stories actually have an effect on our social relationship with that person.
So, we can conclude two factors in general. One, people are obsessed with behind-the-scenes looks at people’s lives. Where garden-variety Instagram pics are more manicured and, many times, posed. Insta-Stories are decidedly not. They’re off-the-cuff. They’re spontaneous. And they’re far more real and believable. And that’s what people like about them. Second, there’s definitely an “above the fold” behavior at play here. To review your Instagram pics, you have to thumb through hundreds (in many cases) of pics each day. Meanwhile, your Insta-Stories are right there at the top of your screen–every time. Which is easier to access? Many times, human behavior is very predictable. We are easy going and we want to forget anything we did as soon as possible; let’s just say Twenty-Four hours.
Cheers!
Reference:
https://www.feedough.com/how-does-instagram-make-money-instagram-revenue-model/
https://www.maketecheasier.com/stories-on-social-media/
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.665.8938&rep=rep1&type=pdf
https://stratechery.com/2018/facebooks-story-problem-and-opportunity/
https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/why-instagram-posts-dont-get-engagement/
https://www.buzzfeed.com/elfyscott/heres-how-instagram-affects-our-psychology-according-to
https://in.mashable.com/culture/11787/why-is-it-so-tempting-to-rewatch-your-own-instagram-story