Five Tips for Digital Storytelling

So you want to tell a story using a digital medium. Where do you even start? With these five handy tips, of course!

These are five basic tips that apply to all digital stories you might want to tell. Here are some elaborations on the points made in the infographic:

1. Know Your Audience

It’s important to know who you’re talking to when telling a story. What kind of stories does your audience like? How do they like to be told them? How are they likely to react? Being able to answer these questions will allow you to tailor your story so that it’s received by the people you want to reach and ensure that it drives you outcome you’re looking for.

2. Know Your Story

Meandering conversations can be enjoyable with friends over coffee, but when you’re vying for the attention of the online masses, knowing what you want to say and how you want to say it is important. Make sure your story is well structured with a beginning, middle, and end, and that it fits with the platform you’re using to tell it. There’s nothing worse than writing a great tweet only to discover you need four extra character spaces.

3. Use Different Media

This blog post wouldn’t be half as interesting without the infographic in it. That’s because different ways of presenting information catch our attention, and visual information is absorbed much more quickly than text. So be sure to play around with what formats you put your story in. Think a podcast might be a good medium? Give it a try! Have the perfect gif to convey how you’re feeling? Use it! Don’t let standard text limit how you express yourself.

4. Build Relationships

This one is a bit tricky. The point of telling stories online is to forge a connection between whoever’s telling the story and whoever’s taking it in. That way, you can build familiarity, trust, and even friendship between you and your audience. With this, you can become a respected authority on your topic of choice and position yourself as your audience’s go-to for information, products, advice, or whatever it is you provide. So make sure to choose stories that make things personal so that people can relate to them, and thereby relate to you.

5. Try New Things

It’s comfortable to stick with the tried and true, but don’t be afraid to venture into the unknown every now and then! Whether there’s a new format available on a social media platform, or whether you just want to try telling a different kind of story that day, experimenting is the best way to find new methods of expressing yourself and engaging your audience. You never know if something will work until you try it, after all.

Now that you’re equipped with these tips, go out and try telling some stories! Practice makes perfect, but keeping these basic principles in mind will give you a direction to start in.