Facebook's Creative Shop presents 10 tips to tell great stories to build brand value on Facebook.

1. Facebook Creative Shop
Stories Building Brands
10 content best practices for
your brand on Facebook
v06.2014 | Global

2. Butfirst,3importantreminders

3. The News Feed is your brand's most important placement.
People spend more than half of their time on Facebook on their News Feed.

4. Mobile made Facebook the most personal and engaging canvas ever created.
The feed is full of real stories, from real people. Consider them your competition.

5. Good creative on Facebook is just good creative.
Everything competes with everything – fight the indifference with great ideas.

7. Stop being the vanilla ice cream – you don't have to
please everybody. Stop having a positioning, start
taking a stand. That way your brand will be
recognized even if people don't see your name or
logo.
Make choices, define a strong point of view, have a
clear voice, think of specific audiences. If they are
all true to your brand ideals, that will resonate with
people clearly. That's what big brands do.
1.
Abrandis
apointofview

8. For years Dove is on a mission:
reinforce women's self-
confidence so they can fell
happy with whom they are.
That's why their images never
show supermodels in
glamorous situations,
preferring real people that are,
truly, beautiful.

9. Tell stories that only your brand can tell.
Authenticity is the name of the game.
Our brains remember stories much better than
numbers and facts. When we were kids our parents
used fables to teach us life lessons, stories that
seemed disconnected from real life but that in the
end showed us, among other things, to never talk to
strangers. Even if they live in a house made of
candies.
2.
Morestories,lessfacts.

10. Red Bull Stratos was more
than a parachuting stunt, it
was a story factory in a scale
never seen before.
More than one year after Felix
Baumgartner landed, we are
still talking about his
adventure: "Remember that
dude that jumped off space?"

11. Are you here to get likes or to generate business
results?
Escape from the "works on social" jail and from
using memes "because everybody is using it". If a
story or a special date is important for your brand
make that into a campaign and not just a post that
follows a trend.
3.
Cats:useonlyifyou
sellcatfood.
Whypeople
chooseyour
brand
Qualityengagementthat
generatesbusinessresults
Whypeopleshare
onFacebook

12. Instead of following popular
memes Dos Equis created
their own, through repetition
and creativity: The World's
Most Interesting Man.
With statements like "Every
time he goes for a swim
dolphins appear" the character
became a meme of his own,
with fans making up their own
list of facts.
To the point that on Father's
Day 2013 the brand post was
originally written by a fan in
the mother's day post: "He
gave his father 'the talk'".

13. They way your brand is perceived is build with time,
one story at a time. Each post must stand on its
own, but when one sees them as a bigger story they
become even more interesting.
In other words, your brand should be more like
Friends and less like Game of Thrones: people must
be happy with just one episode and those who
follow the whole season will have an even better
understanding of your story.
Build long lasting stories and internal jokes. When
you set the example your lovers (yes, they exist!)
will understand, spread and join the fun.
4.
Consistency,
consistency,
consistency.

14. Newcastle Brown Ale's posts
tell only one story: they are
the "No Bollocks" beer.
Nothing else matters.
This consistency is not
confined to Facebook: the
brand's character lives on TV,
out of home and even on bar's
coasters.

15. Markets have demographics like "women 35+".
Real people have moms. All these people are on
Facebook, telling real stories with their real
identities.
!
More than 1 billion people are on Facebook every
month, but that doesn't mean you have to make
one single message to all of them. Craft something
that give people reached the feeling that this story
was created specifically for them and use the
targeting tools to amplify this message. People
don't mind advertising on Facebook, as long as it's
relevant to their lives. That's the kind of story that
will generate big business results.
5.
Therightstoriesfor
therightpeople

16. Ask Americans what they think
“America is Beautiful” means
and you will get several
different answers.
Coca-Cola turned a mass-
media story into personal
stories by telling 18 different
points of view for their
“America is Beautiful”
Superbowl spot

17. Don't let your content become just a static banner.
Our brains have been trained by years of web surfing
to ignore blinking squares.
Besides being worth a thousand words, an image fires
different feelings on different people.
Images help brands become as interesting as the
coolest people on the feed, igniting emotions that, in
turn, lead to changes in brand perception.
6.
Explorethe
powerofimages.

18. Ben & Jerry’s posts follow a
simple and consistent visual
rule: the ice-cream must
always be at arm's length,
giving the impression that you
can grab the product and start
eating right away.

19. If people, on average, use 16 words to tell their stories,
why does your brand need more?
The fewer words you use, the more room you leave for
people's imagination to fill the 'negative space’.
7.
Text?Short.

20. This is Facebook's most liked
post ever. With just 3 words it
was capable to convey the
individual emotions of every
person that supported Barack
Obama when he announced his
reelection. Instead of facts, this
post opened infinite
possibilites on people's minds.
This picture was shot during
the campaign, but it brought so
much emotion that Obama's
team decided to save it for the
victory post.

21. More and more people use a mobile device as their
primary Facebook interface, so the thumb is the new
remote control.
This makes a visually appealing content crucial to
capture people's attentions. Can your campaign be
enjoyed by people standing up on the subway?
8.
Mobileready?
Mobilebest.

22. For a series of videos about
"playing with food" Oreo
created square-shaped videos,
a format made popular by
Instagram, to subtly tell people
that its videos were short,
funny and could be enjoyed
with no sound.

23. Creativity can also be key in your internal structure
to produce and find stories that your brand will tell.
Not every single story must be created by your
agency or internal team: content partners,
celebrities, brand-lovers and specially your fans can
help you on this challenge. Whenever possible
show your love for them and the content they make
about you.
9.
Lookaroundand
findyourstory

24. Every GoPro owner is a
content creator by nature.
The brand team created the
‘Photo of the Day’ series, and
everyday they search, edit
and publish the best content
they find from consumers all
over the world.

25. There's no recipe for success, there's only your
recipe for success. The software you run on your
computer, including Facebook, doesn't come in
annual boxes anymore. Instead it's constantly
updated, sometimes more than once a day.
Every single post must test an hypothesis: right or
wrong, you learned something about the stories
people want to hear from you.
That's how startups do: build, measure, learn — and
be prepared to be wrong. When something works,
amplify.
10.
Art+science

26. Before talking about their
Made in America music festival
Budweiser used Facebook's
insights about their target to
choose which artists from the
festival's line up would tell the
best stories to millennials.
That allowed them to focus on
specific rising stars,
generating better results than
by using only one mega
popstar.
The campaign insights proved
powerful: 8 out of the 15
artists picked for the
campaign won Grammy
Awards months later.