Emotion is a key element of storytelling—and what is social posting but digital storytelling? The truth is that effective social posting impacts people on an emotional level. If you want to create compelling content, you need to develop its emotional layers.
Conversely, you don’t want to rely on an emotional rudder for your social media ship. The balance of hard number analysis and human-driven content is a winning combination. Let’s break it down.
Storytelling is inherently human
When we think of storytelling, we think of books. We think of podcasts, maybe. What most of us don’t think about is the storytelling of social media. The truth is, your posts tell so many stories. They tell the stories that you’re covering. They tell the stories. Maybe most importantly, for your social team’s purposes, they tell the story of your brand.
The mediums change, but humans communicate through stories, and telling them well is essential. View your content as a coherent thread—what does it say to your audience? With every image, link, and post copy, you’re telling your audience where your values are and what you think is important. Make sure you are intentional with your content and your presentation!
Stories build an engaged audience
Stories are simply shared experience. The depth of the emotion and authenticity in your story matters to your readers, and will connect both connect them to you and inspire loyalty. Shared values are an important part of any relationship—the empathy, humor, and values that you communicated in your work are essential for your brand’s success.
Stories inspire connection
Nothing is more effective at driving interaction than a good story. Whether you want to get your audience to talk to you, share your content, or buy a product, they need to resonate with what you are creating. A good story is always worth sharing.
How do you balance humanity and analytics?
As essential as it is to build a good story and tell it well, it is just as important to understand the role that emotion can play in skewing your distribution. Gone are the days when we had to rely on a social media manager’s “gut” to distribute content well. It doesn’t matter how well we know our audience—sometimes, we’re going to get it wrong.
Even more frustrating, we can get everything right—a compelling story with a strong image and stellar social copy—and it can fall flat. It happens to all of us!
There is simply too much to analyze
Distribution and automation are where the emotion needs to take a back seat. The amount of information we have on our audience and content is staggering—from website data to social media reports, our data is vast and instantaneous. Our staff simply cannot process everything fast enough to be effective.
Your staff has to trust technology to process the numbers and help make judgment calls on things like posting cadence, content selection, and tone.
Humans are biased
Additionally, every one of us has a bias. It doesn’t matter how hard we work to eliminate them—our previous experience will color how we present content and what content we choose to produce. AI is not going anywhere, and it is up to us to learn how to use it ethically.
One of the benefits of AI is that it does not have our human biases. At its core, AI tools are simply running numbers and making predictions based on massive amounts of data—and it works.
Tools like True Anthem can help remove creator bias and challenge publishers to look at reality. When we get comfortable and our content simply feels right, it’s easy to ignore the obvious. Relying on a strong AI tool to tell you the truth about your content and help make data-driven decisions is not only safe, but it is an essential step forward in a world of algorithms and competition.
We’d love to show you how we can help you move forward and balance good stories with smart distribution. Reach out today to set up your demo.
