With stage one of re-opening officially underway here in Ontario, many businesses are scrambling to get their doors open and to reach out to their audience to let them know.

This week we're taking a look at some strategies for social storytelling and tactics for how to break through the noise on social media, as every business is reaching out to their audience at the same time.

What are some challenges you've been finding? What strategies have been working for you? Join in the conversation and share your experiences with us!

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What is Social Storytelling?
For years we've been inundated by aggressive marketing, with the focus blatantly on promotion and selling. Things have changed. Marketing has evolved. Social media allows consumers to communicate directly with brands, and the focus of marketing has shifted to an emotional appeal with goals ranging from community building to brand awareness, by simply telling your audience what your brand is all about.

Social media storytelling can come in so many different shapes and sizes, and can be drastically different, depending on the platform you're engaging with.

For example, if your audience is on Instagram (or Pinterest), you'll want to tell your brand story with beautiful, curated imagery.

A great example of a visual storytelling post on Instagram about travel.

Here is an example of creating a story by curating your posts into a tiled story that creates a theme.

On Facebook you'll want to take a casual, community-minded tone, tell relatable lifestyle, human stories, and share captivating imagery or informative videos.

From the Humans of New York Facebook Page. Their post is quite long and requires people to click “See more,” but it gets significant engagement.
What's New
We've scoured the internets for some juicy tidbits of knowledge and have compiled a list of great reads about social media storytelling and different strategies you can use for inspiration and insights. Let's dive in.

* How To Tell a Story On Social Media - Some really great insights by the social media master of genuine storytelling, GaryVee. He talks about our on-demand culture, Hollywood vs social media storytelling, and the most valuable commodity to us all and how we spend it - time.
* How to Leverage Storytelling to Increase Your Conversions - Another great thought leader we love here at the Hive is Neil Patel. In this blog post he talks extensively about the art of storytelling, content segmentation, how audience engagement can define your brand, and how to use storytelling to increase conversions.
* How to engage customers on social with brand storytelling - This article talks about the importance of knowing your audience, how to create resources that relate to your brand to use as content to share, using content from your community, and giving back.
* Social Media Storytelling - How To Do It Right? - This article has a ton of great content on the nature of storytel...