Two-second storytelling

Participation in social media is constantly growing and evolving, and never more so than now.

There are nearly 3.5 billion active users of social media in the world and almost all of them access social via mobile. Our daily habits are changing, from where we engage with news to how we connect with our friends online, and the social media environment is a maelstrom of content and information.

Every day the average social media user scrolls through 300 feet of content in their feeds. It’s an enormously noisy and competitive arena.

The first challenge for marketers is to understand how to reach the right audience. The second is to recognise that we have their attention for less than two seconds even if we do make it into their feeds – and to get our story across in that minuscule period of time.

But humans only need to see an image for 13 milliseconds to identify it correctly, and there is academic research that shows that we’ve evolved to concentrate not in continuous bouts of attention, but in 250-second millisecond blocks. In other words we understand and absorb what we see incredibly quickly. It has an impact, too. Facebook tells us that 25% of purchase intent is driven by video views shorter than two seconds, while 38% of brand recall can be attributed to two-second video.

The motivation for using social media has shifted away from social connection and towards access to entertaining content; we have at our disposal a short but extremely powerful moment in which to tell our story.

But what is the story? The components of a great story haven’t changed for millennia. First, it needs tension. It needs a source of friction, the starting point of a compelling tale and a reason for the consumer to stop scrolling. When it comes to social, it’s useful to think about how to present and then solve a problem. Second, it needs human interest. It needs a connection, a source of empathy and shared experience. When our task is to communicate through social media it’s the simple yet tricky matter of making the story truly relevant to the consumer. Third, it needs topicality. This is particularly important in the lightning-fast modern media world. Why is this story important today? That’s a lot to achieve in a couple of seconds but it can be done. The best short-form social media content is simple, fun and effective. It catches the eye and tells its story in an immediately understandable way.

But the real opportunity presented by two-second storytelling in social media is in the number of these micro-moments we can create. A 30-second television commercial is a very effective way to communicate a story but a social media marketer also sees value in ten three-second videos, each delivering a message in its own right while laddering up to a unifying thought. A ‘Reach & Frequency’ advertising strategy allows us to take those moments and place them in consumers’ social feeds, generating brand impact through a series of instantaneous stories. Reaching the audience just once doesn’t have the same effect.

TV might serve as the steepest spikes over the course of a campaign, but if we can tell stories in those two seconds in social, if we can really make those powerful little moments work hard, social media can maintain the upward curve.

If you would like an audit of your social media channels or to chat about your requirements, contact tom.grocott@mccann.com

Tom Grocott is Managing Partner, McCann Social.