The Storykit blog

Firing out memes before they go stale, reacting to live events and amplifying their colleagues’ posts to turn them into internal influencers — here's how you keep your socials strong, and up to speed, without compromising your brand.

What does “on brand” even mean, anyway? 

Your authenticity is far more valuable than one viral moment. If you’ve ever caught yourself saying something doesn’t “feel” on brand for you, take a step back and consider why it isn’t resonating. Is the messaging not aligning? Is the tone off? You should be able to clearly illustrate that feeling to everyone in the business. 

Go back to basics and rip up your rule book. Your brand guidelines are probably written for a very different era of content marketing, where you’d dust off the guidelines occasionally. Now, when there’s more content to approve more quickly, make sure everyone’s on the same page, even if that page is a live document that’s constantly evolving.

Here’s how to nail your content guidelines properly 

1. Know your values

‍When you know your values, you know where to draw the line. How provocative is your brand willing to be, and what do you stand for? If you know your brand inside out, you’ll be able to align your messaging with trending moments easily. That means your whole team can equip themselves with knowing which bandwagons to jump on, and which are better left to die. 

2. Shift your tone

‍Adopt a slightly different tone for each social channel if you haven’t already, and ask yourself if your tone is restricting you creatively. Meet your audience where they are: people on LinkedIn aren’t looking for the latest riff on celebrity gossip, and people scrolling Stories don’t need to watch a seven-part series on your company culture. Social media is all about having a conversation, and nobody wants to talk to the boring guy in the suit still talking about work at the bar! 

3. Tool up

‍The phrase “work smarter, not harder” has never been truer as more assets are needed more often. So expand your content toolkit. Keep your content engaging and on-brand in just a click, and let Storykit take all the hassle out of great content creation by speeding it up. You write the words, we’ll automagically create social-ready videos. 

4. Get specific

‍What colours and fonts should you use on Instagram Stories? What sounds are appropriate for Reels and TikToks? What kind of punctuation should you avoid in blog posts? What are some examples of trends that would work for the brand, and which definitely wouldn’t? Illustrate the guide with real-life examples so you’re all singing from the same hymn sheet. 

Experiment, test and prepare to fail

‍Play with emerging features and platforms to find the right fit for your brand. If you’re trailblazing a trend, you’re subconsciously showing your audience that you’re innovative, and opening doors for new audiences at the same time. It might just pay dividends! Or it might not. As long as you know your parameters, that’s okay too – after all, if no feelings are hurt, then failed efforts on social will all be forgotten with the next scroll.  

Keeping your content on brand at scale doesn’t have to be an impossible task. Join Jonna Ekman, Marketing Director at Storykit, and Fredrik Strömberg, our co-founder and CPO, as they discuss keeping your content on-brand and on-message in the latest episode of Storykit Talks Live. Watch the webinar on Youtube, here, or listen to it as a podcast, here. 

If you work in content and are faced with a dizzy sensation every time you open your social apps, you might just be tempted to try and “hack” the algorithm to improve your social performance.

Spoiler alert: you can’t.Truth is, it’s easy to scapegoat the algorithm (and it certainly does play a part). But often it’s because your content isn’t resonating with people. After all, what won’t change is that every content platform wants the same thing: for viewers to stay right where they are.

So here are three ways to improve your content's performance, with practical examples so you can start experimenting.

1. Treat social as a dialogue, not a monologue

How can your brand seamlessly slot into the conversation of the day? Reflecting what’s already trending gives your content broader appeal, giving you a stronger chance of cutting through. Not only that; it’s a great way to subtly reinforce that you’re innovative and more forward-thinking than your stale competitors. Social isn’t an exact science.

Before you post, always ask: would I want to engage with this if I saw it on my feed? After all, you’re trying to appeal to your audience’s waning attention span.

2. Grab attention, then reward it

Make sure the first line of your captions and first frame of your social posts are scroll-stopping enough to pique interest. You can tell the rest of the story later. For example, you could use a refreshingly human quote rather than a predictable testimonial, use strong imperatives, make a controversial statement and then challenge it or evoke the power of FOMO – think of it like a newspaper headline.

3. And, yes, you should be posting videos

Regardless of algorithm updates, videos already make sense on every social platform, meaning you’ll be able to grab more attention, for longer. Hello, improved engagement rate.

But we know the last thing social teams need is more work.

So what if creating seriously good videos took seriously less time than a graphic? Just pop great text in, and we’ll pop great videos out. See for yourself. You could start enjoying a longer coffee break as soon as tomorrow!

1. Hack your routine

Only you can truly know what will work best for you. Take a moment to review your calendar and be honest with yourself – what times and days of the week do you feel most productive? When do meetings work for you? When do you get more distracted?

Then, you can compartmentalize your day – setting your tasks in chunks according to how you work best. Audit how long a task takes on average, and block out time in your calendar accordingly. This will help you predict your workload better in future, and keep you free from last-minute meetings so you can focus.

2. Delegate, delegate, delegate!

Wearing every hat when producing content can make for a very heavy head – so don’t juggle it all alone! While you might not have the luxury of a massive team for support, you do have powerful machines on your side. You just might not have met them yet.

Here are a few of our favorite tools to keep your day running smoothly:

• Create videos from a line of text with Storykit (of course!)
• Get content inspiration from AnswerThePublic
• Have your captions written by Copy.ai
• Distribute and schedule on social with Later.com
  

3. Set realistic expectations and boundaries

If you’ve said yes to everything since you joined your team, you might just find yourself swamped with unachievable deadlines (and a caffeine addiction). Don’t say yes to everything – you risk burning out! Make sure your workload is fair for the week ahead, and don’t be afraid to push back on tight deadlines.

You may want to try to implement a “deep focus” day or regular work session, so you can get more out of your working hours.

Make sure you have a really tight process that takes as little admin time as possible by putting together a quick Google Form for new requests, so you get the information you need pre-filled instead of needing to chase for it.

When it comes to LinkedIn, increasing your reach is key to making a bigger impact and connecting with the right people.

In this article, we'll explain what reach means and show you how Matías Picun was able to expand his reach on LinkedIn by 457% completely organically with just video.

What is reach on LinkedIn? 

Reach on LinkedIn refers to the total number of unique users who see your content or profile within a specific period. It measures the extent of your visibility and the potential audience you can engage with on the platform.

Increasing your reach means expanding your content's visibility to a larger audience, allowing you to connect with more professionals and increase your influence on LinkedIn.

How Matias Picun expanded his reach with video on LinkedIn

When our colleague Matías Picun posted 60 (!) videos in 30 days and saw his LinkedIn impressions increase with 457%, we, of course, wanted to know ALL about it.

Matías, how did you come up with this idea? 

– I wanted to show everyone that it really is possible to create several videos every day. A lot of the people I meet tell me they can’t find the time to produce content consistently, so I decided to convince them otherwise. 

– I started out by making a content calendar in which I added all of the events, special occasions and holidays I knew I wanted to highlight in my feed. Those were, for example, May the 4th, Cinco the Mayo and when my football team played a game. I went into the Script Editor and pasted my text, then did some final adjustments to the storyboard. For some of the series I had planned, like presenting my Spanish colleagues at Storykit, I created a few templates that I could reuse. 

You made all of your videos in both English and Spanish. How did that go? 

– That was super easy. I made one video, duplicated the storyboard and just added the translation. Occasionally I changed some assets to better reflect the language and culture. 

What was the hardest part of your challenge? 

– The creative process was at times challenging. Not knowing if an idea was entertaining or interesting enough. Sometimes I would come up with brand new ideas and had to replan my calendar. But for the most part it was a super fun challenge to do. 

And the results? Have you seen any effect? 

– Enormous effect! In May, I increased the number of impressions with 457%, and my engagement rate increased with 335%. But the result is that I have inspired other people to do the same thing!

Ready to expand your reach on LinkedIn? Use Matías' strategy to boost your impact!

Ready to give Matías' strategy a try? By following his lead and incorporating video content into your LinkedIn presence, you can expand your reach and make a significant impact. And when it comes to creating compelling videos effortlessly, Storykit is here to help.

Peder: Tell me Jonna, how 6 months ago a rebrand wasn’t even on the cards and now it’s happening. And now it’s happening it’s obviously the right thing to do… but how did we get here?

Jonna: We’ve seen such massive changes to the company lately; we’re growing at a crazy pace, the product is changing in the most spectacular way, we did a new investment round, and we’ve also been busy helping all our clients tell their stories. Suddenly we realised we hadn’t paid much attention to telling our own. The brand wasn’t evolving at the same pace as everything else.

Everything happened in a very Storykit kind of way, didn’t it?

– Yes! First of all, we started with the words. What do we say, how can we tell the story about our brand as clearly as possible? What is this new position, and how do we convey it clearly?

Tell me more about the new position?

– The way video is consumed has changed: The audience’s demand for video is endless, and they truly want video everywhere, and for everything. But the way companies produce video hasn’t changed: either they use in-house specialists and agencies, which leads to resource-intensive, time-consuming video production with a high risk of bottlenecks that will slow you down.

– Or, video is produced in a makeshift way, where professional communicators need to use free apps, templated software, or start filming scrappy stuff with their phones. This might be fun, but most brands soon realise it’s not sustainable, because it’s impossible to keep control and the quality is – at best – inconsistent.

– This is why Storykit just launched a game-changing text-to-video feature, which allows our customers to write videos instead of editing them. If they’ve got words, now they’ve got video. This means that millions of people who can write text, now can create brilliant videos in minutes, with Storykit. This puts us in a new space in the video category, where we are offering something entirely different. Storykit completely changes how people think about and work with video.

For me all of this sounds quite familiar?

– It should! The funny thing is that this is nothing new to us, turning stories and text to video has been our passion since day one. But now it’s also our brand.

So, first you set the words, and then you moved on to the visuals. This wasn’t the original plan, was it?

– No, haha, that's totally on you. I never felt the need for a total rebrand but we evolved into it, and now that it is here it already feels like home. We loved the old design, it was fun and vivid, but the clearer we saw our positioning, we realised that the old look was impeding our story. The new design is built on the story we are telling, and when all those pieces came together it was nothing less than magical.

You didn’t do all this without external help, tell me a bit about that?

– To get the words and the design right we teamed up with the amazing brand agency Brand Gym from the get go, and they’ve played a crucial part in this. They immediately saw that everything was already there: the product, the content, the vision, the people – we were all pointing in the same direction, we just didn’t have a clear story to tell.

Everyone telling the same story isn’t easy in a rapidly scaling organisation in multiple markets?

– No, this is why I’m so happy we now have a powerful brand promise that everyone 100% believes in and stands for: Video for everyone, Video for everything. We even have this great new line, Storykit it, which captures all our empowering enthusiasm for all things video.

Now that the new brand is out there, what does the future hold?

– We have so much cooking! We are always on a mission to help organisations and brands tell their stories. Since the story is key for video creation in Storykit, we will be doing a lot more of this going forward. Joining our Facebook group Video for social media is a great way to start, if you don’t want to risk missing out on all the fun.

To wrap this up: what’s your recommendation for brands that want to do high volume, even higher quality video?

– Go ahead and Storykit it, of course!

I’ve been working with communication for decades, but my brain will still pretty much explode as soon as I try to use any traditional video editing software. I open them. I realise I need to start with creating a timeline. Or several timelines. Booom. It never ends well.

– Your reaction is not surprising. Many of us who work with communication are used to doing linear storytelling. We write our information or stories on paper, which gives us total freedom to write them exactly how we want them, says Fredrik Strömberg, CPO at Storykit.

Ok, does video work differently?

– Yes, if you create video using traditional video editing software, your story needs to be based on which video clips you have, and your footage will control your storytelling. What you have on camera will be more crucial for your video than which information you want to get out there.

Start writing your videos

But not anymore. With the brand new Storykit script editor, you simply copy or write a text and watch your storyboard build before your eyes. Sound crazy? It is. But it’s true: now you can start writing your videos.

– This means that we are enabling everyone who can write to also create video, in a way we are all familiar with – by writing, says Fredrik Strömberg.

It sounds like magic; how does it work?

– Well there is of course the long story on how the AI we’ve built works, but the short version is that you write your text, and Storykit starts creating the video. We simply want our users to focus on telling their stories and let Storykit build the video around that story.

Creating video using the Storykit script editor is so easy that you might even think, “why not make it a video too?” about every text you write. Among other things, the feature gives you:

1. Tremendous flexibility in your storytelling. You can write pretty much any story you like. 
2. Instant help with your video creation. Letting the AI build your storyboard will make your video creation easier than ever. 
3. 100% control. You can handle everything from writing your words, finding and choosing your assets, building your storyboard structure, and even choosing your slide types directly in the text editor. And if you want to do some final touches, you just switch over to the storyboard editor.
   
   

Want to see this with your own eyes? Book a demo today and we'll show you!