All the Stories! (From Snapchat Stories to Twitter Fleets) – Web and Beyond Live – November 23, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am6yWXWy9QA

All the Stories! (From Snapchat Stories to Twitter Fleets) - Web and Beyond Live - November 23, 2020

Now that every major social network has a Stories format, plus Google has launched Web Stories for WordPress, I spent this Web and Beyond Live describing the differences among the various Stories formats.

Each week, President of W3 Consulting and Managing Director of W3C Web Services (https://web.w3cinc.com/) Ray Sidney-Smith broadcasts live to update you on the latest small business digital marketing and business productivity technology updates you need to be effective.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://webandbeyondcast.com/ for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

If you'd like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments.

In this Cast

Ray Sidney-Smith, Host

Show Notes

Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

The world’s largest retailer believes shopping has changed forever: Morning Brief Apple Reduces App Store Commissions to 15% for Small Businesses Starting Next Year - MacStories Apple Podcasts launches new embeddable web players for shows and episodes - 9to5Mac Small Business: Owning the Future - The New York Times Join Web and Beyond Community!

Raw Text Transcript

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases.

Read More

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:09
Hello, everybody, and welcome to web and beyond live. This is November 23 2020. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith, President of W three consulting and managing director of WCC web services, which provides affordable WordPress, hosting, as well as web hosting and domain name registration services for small business. My goal each week is to come to you and talk about digital marketing and productivity technologies that help you market and manage on the web, mobile, social media and beyond. And today, what I'd like to do is I'd like to cover some just quick news. And then jump into a topic that I've been getting a lot of questions about, and that are stories, the whole format of stories, kind of how stories work, and so on, and so forth. So I wanted to just talk a little bit about the particulars of stories, and how that can be useful to you in your business, and kind of some productivity tips for being able to create stories faster and better, especially especially as I start to think about stories more myself in my own business. So let's talk about some of the news, I wanted to cover just a quick few items that I think are going to be important to you going into the next few months. One is that Yahoo Finance recently put out, and they had a video where they were talking about the fact that Walmart put out their recent third quarter earnings results. And they noted something very important in the report, they talked about how resilient consumers have remained throughout this particular season, related to the pandemic and responding to the pandemic. Now, Walmart has made tremendous inroads in terms of making sure that they were amping up their walmart.com digital presence. And so their digital retail experience is, is just really blown up for them. They've also worked on making sure that their their in store systems are matched up with their curbside delivery functions. So I'm sorry, curbside pickup functions. So you're capable of doing more curbside pickup, and just kind of streamlining those operations. And it's really interesting, because the CEO was making a note, in essence, to say that they're not changing,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am6yWXWy9QA

All the Stories! (From Snapchat Stories to Twitter Fleets) – Web and Beyond Live – November 23, 2020

Now that every major social network has a Stories format, plus Google has launched Web Stories for WordPress, I spent this Web and Beyond Live describing the differences among the various Stories formats.

Each week, President of W3 Consulting and Managing Director of W3C Web Services (https://web.w3cinc.com/) Ray Sidney-Smith broadcasts live to update you on the latest small business digital marketing and business productivity technology updates you need to be effective.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://webandbeyondcast.com/ for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

If you’d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments.

In this Cast

Ray Sidney-Smith, Host

Show Notes

Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

The world’s largest retailer believes shopping has changed forever: Morning Brief 
Apple Reduces App Store Commissions to 15% for Small Businesses Starting Next Year – MacStories 
Apple Podcasts launches new embeddable web players for shows and episodes – 9to5Mac 
Small Business: Owning the Future – The New York Times 
Join Web and Beyond Community!

Raw Text Transcript

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases.

Read More

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:09

Hello, everybody, and welcome to web and beyond live. This is November 23 2020. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith, President of W three consulting and managing director of WCC web services, which provides affordable WordPress, hosting, as well as web hosting and domain name registration services for small business. My goal each week is to come to you and talk about digital marketing and productivity technologies that help you market and manage on the web, mobile, social media and beyond. And today, what I’d like to do is I’d like to cover some just quick news. And then jump into a topic that I’ve been getting a lot of questions about, and that are stories, the whole format of stories, kind of how stories work, and so on, and so forth. So I wanted to just talk a little bit about the particulars of stories, and how that can be useful to you in your business, and kind of some productivity tips for being able to create stories faster and better, especially especially as I start to think about stories more myself in my own business. So let’s talk about some of the news, I wanted to cover just a quick few items that I think are going to be important to you going into the next few months. One is that Yahoo Finance recently put out, and they had a video where they were talking about the fact that Walmart put out their recent third quarter earnings results. And they noted something very important in the report, they talked about how resilient consumers have remained throughout this particular season, related to the pandemic and responding to the pandemic. Now, Walmart has made tremendous inroads in terms of making sure that they were amping up their walmart.com digital presence. And so their digital retail experience is, is just really blown up for them. They’ve also worked on making sure that their their in store systems are matched up with their curbside delivery functions. So I’m sorry, curbside pickup functions. So you’re capable of doing more curbside pickup, and just kind of streamlining those operations. And it’s really interesting, because the CEO was making a note, in essence, to say that they’re not changing, they don’t think that human consumer habits are going to shift all that much post pandemic. And the reason I bring this up is that I think it’s really important for us all to take heart to the fact that we’re doing all of this work, I hope, I hope you’re doing all of this work to get your digital experience up and running. This is not just retail, by the way, service business as well as product and otherwise, you need to start thinking about your digital experience. Because the big box retailers are thinking that consumers are have seen a permanent shift in the way in which they’re going to be buying, which is that they want both, they want the retail experience, and they want the digital experience. And they want the hybrid approach to be able to do that type of buying you as a small business owner need to have parity there. And today, the technology really gives you the capability of doing that at an affordable rate and at a streamlined workflow process. So you can do it. So do not think that you can’t do it. And if there’s anybody out there who thinks they can do it, and wants to ask me questions about that, feel free to do so. And I’ll be happy to go ahead and,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:30

and help out. So the point is, is that you are capable of doing this? And and it seems like consumers want it. And so we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t forget that. Okay, so just that was just a really, really interesting point that I think we all need to take into account that this this change is permanent. And Walmart, if Walmart thinks the permanent change is happening, I would pretty much take that into account. Because you know, Walmart is doing a lot more market research than we are. And they’re paying, they’re getting a whole lot more data than we are in terms of things. And they’re they’re understanding that. Okay, just a couple quick other news items. One is, Apple has made a really interesting kind of announcement. Apple has a small business section for their developers. And in their Apple Small Business program. They have the app, the app, what they call the App Store, small business program. And this is just important for those of you who do work in technology and are developing applications on the apple ecosystem. And that also means that if you have intentions of ever launching an app on the Apple Store or the Apple App Store, this is something that you should pay attention to also and don’t think Oh no, never me. I would never launch anything on the Apple App Store. Because mobile applications are also really easy to launch. Nowadays there are applications that help you build those mobile applications and you can do it too do not think that you can and but in line with that. Apple has basically announced they normally take 30% of Any purchase that’s made through the Apple App Store, they have reduced that to 15% for any business that earns under $1 million per year. So that would be the majority of us. And in terms of app revenues, and if you are making more than that fantastic. But the idea here is that for those who are under that amount, you’re able to go ahead and now reduce the commission that you’re paying to Apple by half down to that 15% point, which is just phenomenal. And it’s it’s also still an egregious amount of money that Apple is taking. But the reality is, is for what they’re doing, I can understand the justification for that in some way, shape, or form. And hopefully, there’s more reform over time, and everybody can make money in the Apple App Store ecosystem. Kind of the same thing happens in the Google Play Store. Google also takes its commission. So that’s just what it

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:53

is. Okay, next up on staying in line with Apple. Apple has recently announced that Apple podcasts will now be able to have embeddable players and put embeddable web web players for shows and episodes, which means that you’ll now be able to go into the podcasts Connect, which they’re now calling, maybe iTunes Connect, I can ever remember what they’re renaming this thing to every day. But in essence, when you go to the Apple website, you can go to the podcast if you have a podcast, and you can find the embeddable players that you can now embed on your own websites. This is incredibly powerful, because a lot of people still listen, you know, a lot of people still listen to our podcast via Apple podcasts. And, and now you can embed those players directly on your website, giving access to the Apple podcast ecosystem, and therefore, you know, reducing your overhead in terms of having to connect people to that platform. Last but not least, is a section on the New York Times website. And they’re calling this owning the future. And I just wanted to bring everybody’s attention to this new york times section on their website. And it has a whole bunch of really interesting articles. And one of those articles is all about how to, you know, gain access to some of the programs that are being provided to small businesses now that the PPP and idle loans are, you know, kind of ending and we don’t know what’s going to be happening with regard to some of the other functions within the cares act that have been supporting small business, we don’t know what’s going to happen between now and January. And certainly after January, once the new administration comes into the White House, we’re just not sure. And so this section on the website has given some resources, I’m going to link that to if you go to WCC inc.com. And so if you, if you go to our website, at the top, you’ll see the COVID-19 resources, I’m going to link to this there so that you have access to that. But also note that here, it has some really interesting things on businesses that are pivoting and how they’ve been pivoting. They have some interesting resources, like I said, and other ways that you can support some other small businesses. And so if you want to, you can look at that article, right, there are nine ways to support small businesses, that article itself are really ways in which you can now create some social content to let your audience know how they can support your business. So really, I think it’s just really critical right now to kind of review all these resources, know what you can do, and it’s going to help you generate some content. I will be writing about a lot of these nine ways, in the coming weeks. And I just think it’s really important that people are aware of them, just know that that it is there. And it’s really greater than New York Times to have created this owning the future kind of section. And one of the other items that I noted in kind of like the all the various businesses that have done this, all of them have leaned on technology in order to be able to make this happen. They all have beefed up their digital experience. They’ve accessed mobile applications and the the gig worker economy apps, all of them are using technology to be able to shore them themselves up during this period. And I found it even more fascinating that in one particular business, there was a restaurant business that was a restaurant tour that was talking about her struggles. And of course, she’s using grubhub, and doordash, and all these other websites. But guess what, she doesn’t have a website. And so this restaurant that is struggling, doesn’t have a website, and they don’t control their own future because they’re beholden to all of these gig worker economy apps. And as I noted last week, regarding doordash, you know, doordash, and Uber and the rest of them, they just want to replace the humans with technology. And once they can do that they will, which of course is going to have a tremendous impact on our economy. And so we keep giving money to these people on both ends, right. The businesses are paying them to be able to do deliver delivery. And on the on the consumer end. We’re paying for delivery. And we just keep giving money to this technology companies who in essence, are not supporting small businesses, you know, they’re in essence want to make sure that they can continue their kind of control over the ecosystem. But they are not pro business. They are not pro small business, they are pro their own businesses. And so I just wanted to make sure everybody was kind of aware of that. Okay.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 10:18

With that out of the way, what I wanted to do was to talk about stories. The stories formats have really been around since 2013, in terms of technology. But of course, stories have been around since the age since the dawn of the age of humankind. In essence, we navigate the world through story. There’s a reason why stories are so embedded in our kind of fabric of being. And that is because we understand we understand both the world around us in terms of narrative. And we remember things better in terms of narrative. And it’s really important for us to really get at the fact that technology is supposed to support humankind. It’s not taking us away from our, our biological existence, it is supposed to support and extend our biological experiences. And in so many ways, we keep forgetting that. And then when we look at the the travails of technology, the things that we think technology are not doing well, for us, it’s because we’re trying for it, we’re trying to reject the parts that make us human, the parts that make us humane, the parts that make us better. And what I really want to enforce is this notion of using in technology, the stories format, to be able to extend the brand into being more human being more humane, and helping people be better. So that’s what stories are all about is about this idea of connecting across as I frequently talk about these technologies like social media and social networks, and blogs, podcasts, and video channels, and so and so forth. this live stream itself on web and beyond live, nothing, nothing, not all of these are nothing more than an extension, a digital bridge between me and you, I get to talk to you one to one across vast distances in real time, right now, those who are listening on the podcast whenever you’d like. And I can do all of that because of technology, right? I’m still a human, you’re still human, unless the AI is listening, and Hello there. But the reality is, is that this is for us, this is for us humans. And we need to remember that we’re creating this content for other humans, there’s a heart and mind on the other end of every communication that we are creating online. And and so when we’re doing that, we need to remember that humans react and respond well to stories. So with that in mind, stories, as I said, came into being thanks to a company called Snapchat at the time now snap, Inc, and their ephemeral messaging application, Snapchat, now Snapchat back then was on iOS only. Now, of course, it’s available on both major mobile platforms, as well as web interface that has some limited functions. And essence, what I want to do is walk you through how these features work, and, and then some of the various details about them. And I am in the process, actually, of building out a stories story using the most, at least one of the latest iterations of the stories format. And and so hopefully, by the end of this week, I will have that put together, and I’m gonna actually put together a stories tutorial on how to use that inside of Google Web stories, so that everybody can kind of learn about it. I think, Robin, from start to grow with Hi, Robin, if you’re watching, I had, she had requested some more information on Google Web stories. And I recognize that it can be a little bit difficult for people to understand that. So I wanted to do just a quick video to build that out for folks and help them understand that better better. So I will put that out it will be in two parts. One will be kind of strategy on one side. And then the other part will be on how to actually set up a Google Web stories story in the system. Okay, so first, as I said, Snapchat, Snapchat launched in October 2013. And and as you may or may not be aware, stories themselves are really designed for a vertical or portrait, most people call it a portrait format, right? And so while I don’t have much to show you on screen, I may show you a couple of the items here. I just want to explain to you how these, these work. So first and foremost, there is the sizes so stories come in both the normal user feed, you can also run story ads through Snapchat so they have the story format in the ad

Raymond Sidney-Smith 14:47

format as well. They are typically 1080 by 1920. And and this is kind of my first tip here, which is that 1080 by 1920 seems to be the standard size across most of the platforms. The The outlier being Pinterest. But the the point in creating the story format. And that, that I think it’s a 916 ratio, that that whole format concept helps you in streamlining your stories creations, creating the various backgrounds or the stories themselves in tools like Canva, or an Adobe Spark, or inside of the Adobe Creative Suite, you might be using InDesign or something like that Photoshop or otherwise, the goal, of course, is to reduce the amount of work necessary to get these generated, we use Canva at W three consulting and WC web services, and absolutely love it. And we use the Instagram story, sizing that as the template, so we just use that 1080 by 1920 format. And it’s just pretty easy for us to be able to create all the other stories to be able to get there. And so store. Robin is saying yes, I’m so excited, you were telling us more about stories. Yes, stories are a fantastic format, and are really, really powerful in terms of getting in front of folks. And so with Snapchat continuing 1080 by 1920, you can post photo and video, video can be up to 10 seconds in length. And this really ends up being important across all of these systems to understand that certain stories, photos, understandable, there’s just a size and then you can add all kinds of various features to them, like stickers and pins and hash tags, and so on and so forth. On top of overlaying that content on top of them, you can create some content in, say Canva. But then some content actually needs to be created once you upload it to the platform for for being able to push. So the video, of course, then you have that limit of how much video is going to be shared. So you have to be able to set up your video stories to understand, okay, is this video going to be three minutes in length, and therefore I’m gonna have to chop it up for Snapchat in 10 second increments for Facebook or Instagram Stories Am I going to have to cut that to some other, you know, lengthen, in this case, 15 seconds for Instagram and Facebook. And so kind of considering all of those pieces before you get into the format really helps you create these things more streamlined. Okay, so that brings us to Instagram, Instagram, launched the stories format in 2010, October of 2010. So October 2013. It says no. So Snapchat was was first to the market with with stories. So I got my little research here wrong. I’ll fix that in my actual stories that I’ll do later. But either way, Instagram brought up brought out Instagram Stories after Snapchat. They’re also recommended 1080 by 1920 P. And this is the first time I’m seeing a limitation with roughly 20 stories posts per day. Okay, so 20 stories per day are available. And of course, they allow photo and video video up to 15 seconds in length. This is in contrast, of course to livestream and igtv posts. So Instagram allows for multiple types of video posts, you can have a video post in the normal video post perspective, then you have video stories, and that’s the stories post. Then you have live stream, which can be up to 60 minutes in length. And then finally you have igtv posts. And those videos are designed again, portrait also designed for portrait mode as well. And those can be between 15 seconds and 10 minutes in length. So you have some some variety there in terms of the various types of videos provided on Facebook, almost very similarly situated in terms of the 1080 by 1920 P. And in many ways, if you pair your Instagram and Facebook page together, you can post directly to both of those at the same time when you post them to Instagram. So you can open up the Instagram app. And it’ll it’ll have both Instagram and Facebook icons overlapping, you’ll just be able to press that button and push them to both of them at that time. All right, then we have Pinterest. Pinterest is the latest folks to the to the market. They launched their version in 2020. So Facebook

Raymond Sidney-Smith 19:23

brought theirs out Facebook stories in March 2017. But Pinterest is the second to latest the penultimate stories format for the major social networks. And they launched in September 2020 in beta and it’s still only available, I believe, to a limited number of users. So you’ll have to check on Pinterest. But if you have a business account, you’d have to have a business account. So Pinterest business account, it’s free, it’s easy to set up but you do have to have a business account. These are available to you. Now this is where it’s strange. You are allowed to do photos video and what I understand is text and I have don’t have a Pinterest stories, story pins option yet in my interface, so I’m looking forward to seeing it myself. So I don’t know what text means as a post, but they’re saying that you’re capable of posting text. But either way, I’m going to stick to photos and video. And then you can also have up to 20 pages per day in terms of story. So in case I haven’t said this already, all of the stories, stories formats, except for Google Web stories, which I’ll talk about later, basically post the stories format for 24 hours on your profile. And then they become unavailable to users, they they are still available to you as the publisher, you can see them in the back end, but you won’t be able to see them in the front end. But if you were visiting the page, now, what’s unique about Pinterest is that their stories formats are 900 by 1600 pixels. So very different in terms of sizing, what I recommend is to kind of recognize the fact that they they want these stories, pins to basically be really long to stand out from the others that are the other Pinterest posts that are out there, because Pinterest posts are typically portrait anyway. So that’s just a very interesting length. I don’t know if I’m going to really be paying much attention to that or working to make stories specific to that sizing. Maybe if you know, I’ll set up maybe a size in Canva. So I can just duplicate the post, you know, and create those size pins. And if it looks good, I’ll do it. If not, I’m not going to really worry about it. Obviously, if Pinterest is an important platform for you, you want to pay attention to that. Also, story pins allow users people who are viewing the story pins to comment, as well as add photos to story pins. That’s also very unique functionality here that you can actually comment and add photos to the story pins. Okay. Next, then the last one into the market, which is Twitter. Before we get into web stories, on Twitter launched fleets, fleets are their stories, post format that they recently launched. And they are again ephemeral story posts, they last for 24 hours on a Twitter account. It got lit up last week. And and I got access to it. They were testing it a few months ago, I might I might have mentioned this on web and beyond live that they had been testing this in several other countries and seeing how it worked, they finally have rolled it out to all users. So if you see the update in your application, you will now see a row of circles and profile images, yours being the first one with a plus sign on it. And now that allows you to be able to push those fleets. So fleets are different than tweets. In the sense they show up there at the top of the app, the pop top of the application, their mobile only. And again 1080 by 1920 pixels is the typical recommended size. You can push out photos, videos up to 30 seconds in length. So if you have a video that’s longer than that, you have to break those clips up into 32nd increments. And so again, you know, the the idea here is 10 seconds for Snapchat, 15 seconds for Instagram, Facebook, and then we jump down to fleets now at 30 seconds. So giving you a little bit more time there. And then Twitter fleets give you photos, videos up to 30 seconds and then tweets as well. So you can actually share a tweet similar to the way in which Instagram allows you to be able to share a an Instagram post. So you can share a post and you can share other Instagram Stories if you’re mentioned in them into your own stories feed. Well, Twitter allows you to be able to take a tweet and put them out there. What’s unique about fleets again, they last for 24 hours, but you can actually push out an unlimited number of fleets in a 24 hour period. So others are capping you out It seems Snapchat doesn’t seem to be a cap. I’m not quite sure what the actual cap on on Snapchat is. But it’s pretty high. But in terms of Twitter fleets,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 24:06

you can in essence, replicate all the tweets for the day in your fleets. You can replicate other people’s tweets in your fleets. So I’ve been testing that, you know, I have a lot of different Twitter accounts. And so I’m able to now fleet those tweets from those other accounts to my primary accounts. And that’s really quite convenient because now I can I can are both retweet them for folks who are kind of reading the feed. But then I can also put them up in fleets when people want to kind of get a review of their day. They I can take the most important ones and then fleet them and that way they’re available up there at the top for folks to know that they’re important to me for them to see. Okay, last but not least, our Google Web stories. These launched originally in beta as were called amp stories, the accelerated mobile pages format that Google pioneered. And so it’s February 2018. But only in the last few months has Google actually push these out in a format that everyday users could actually create everyday publishers could create. And that was through WordPress, WordPress powers, a third of the world’s websites. So it made a lot of sense for Google to partner with them. But this is actually part of a much larger play that Google is making. And of course, like any product Google makes, they could sunset and get rid of this in our in a heartbeat. But I don’t think they they’re going to and this is, this is the reason for it. Google Web stories is, in essence, a democratized format for stories. I’m hoping that over time, that many more platforms start to accept and adopt and adapt the stories format into their own web platforms. So maybe Squarespace and Shopify and Wix and Weebly and the rest, hopefully, all of them are working with Google to become partners to be able to use this web stories format. In essence, it gives a web stories format that doesn’t require a mobile application, a social network to access those stories, you can access them now across the web. And Google, of course, is indexing those and showing them in their properties that is google.com, on mobile, in their discovery in their Google News apps. And otherwise, this is very, very powerful, because Google really powers most of, of web today, powers web search. And when you go to search for something, you go to Google and you find things that way. And now you’ll be able to find these stories embedded in them. stories in the web stories perspective, only available for you to use, if you have a WordPress website right now, again, as I said, 1080 by 1920 is kind of that magic, size, photos and videos up to 60 seconds in length for videos. So again, now we go from that, you know, 10 seconds at minimum, all the way up to 60 seconds at the maximum in the in the web stories perspective, you must include captions if you’re doing video, by the way. So it gives you the ability to provide captions, and what do I always say what’s good for web accessibility is good for Google. And what’s good for Google, it’s good for small business. So if you were, you know, had that in mind, now, when you upload a video of up to 60 seconds, you can place captions underneath those videos, and provide those captions so that greater accessibility means greater indexing. And greater indexing means you get seen by more people. So you can put captions on there, really good on them for focusing on web accessibility. Google’s always usually good about that. Of course, this means that you are gaining the traffic directly on your website, because you are self hosting the web host web stories, web stories are on your page. That also means that you’re not capped at the number of stories that you can provide in the system, they of course, recommend in the same range that most of the other platforms do between 10 and 20. various stories in the side of the story. But the difference between web stories is that web stories are a permanent fixture, they don’t Sunset over after 24 hours, anything like that, they’re on your website, you can embed them as what’s called a block inside of WordPress, and embed them in many different places around your own website. Other folks, other people who have WordPress websites can embed your stories on their websites as well, they won’t look as pretty but they can do it. And and so the vast extension and distribution of web stories is actually quite powerful. So not only for SEO, because like I said, web stories don’t just disappear after 24 hours like they do on all the other platforms. They are enduring there, they stay around. And so it’s really important for you to keep that in mind as you make your way forward in terms of that. So Google Web stories,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:48

I am going to, like I said, be creating a an all the stories story on WCC inc.com, and I’m going to post it there for folks to be able to see I’ll put a link to that under the video once it’s done. And that way people can check it out and see kind of what it’s all about and why it’s all you know what some of the pieces are there, so that you can kind of quickly reference it. And, and what’s really interesting about the web stories function is that you can actually link dissimilar to the other platforms where you have to have so many followers and so many different requirements. With web stories, you can link to various blog posts and other content of yours around the web. So web stories gives you this extension for being able to do that. Now I wanted to make a couple of notes here regarding how web stories are created and how they’re different from other platforms, and how that might be useful to you. So first and foremost, web stories are designed so that you upload the background images and the images that you’re using from the media library within your WordPress Media Library installation. And so you have to use those pieces and then apply text and any other items like gifts or gifts to the platform. Afterwards, so you’re applying that inside the web stories application. And then and then doing that, that being the case, you want to be able to create your stories in the tool that you’re using, and, and then export them in phases. So if you’re doing photos, for example, you would create those and then upload the background. But at the point the background is created, whatever images and background images, you’re going to use, export that first put that into web stories, and then continue building the the stories for any of the other platforms, whether that be Instagram or otherwise, if you don’t want the text to be text that you’re creating in the mobile application upon going ahead and, and pushing it out. So like, you wouldn’t place hashtags in the image in the Instagram stories, or Facebook stories or otherwise, because you want those hashtags to be created. in the, in the Instagram interface, when you’re launching them, because you want those to be indexed by Instagram for people to be able to find the hashtags, find the people that you’re tagging in those story posts and otherwise. So you’re creating these things in kind of different stages and steps. So you have to kind of get that checklist together. And I’m thinking about that myself in terms of creating a checklist, if I do, I’ll be certain to share it in somewhere around here on the interwebs. For you. But the the concept then is that once you get into the stories format, you then apply and overlay all of the various components, whether that be uploading video, and or text and linking to content, like, you know, if you wrote a blog post on the topic, you put that blog post in there. Now what I’m thinking about when I’m thinking about stories is let me create the stories, especially in the web stories now perspective, let me create the web stories content, and link to content that is valuable to other folks. And then over time, if the stories, that particular web story becomes more popular, then I’m going to write the content that I think is most valuable for people and then replace it inside of the web story, because you have control over modifying it over time. And so if I want to, I could write the all the stories, you know, web story right now, and link to various articles across the web that talk about the various platforms, and then write blog posts that are associated with them. Or I can record videos and tutorials and that kind of thing. And over time, replace those in the story, add new story pages, you know, into the various stories, and basically make it more valuable over time, which of course tells Google all the right things, this is a story, the story has been refreshed, the story has a new value being added to it, which will of course make it more valuable from a search engine optimization perspective. So that’s really important for people to kind of take, you know, take to heart when you’re doing that. Okay, just a couple of quick reminders. As we close up on this conversation, if you have any questions, of course, feel free to post them, tweet at me, leave a comment on the video. And I’ll be happy to run through those. We are hosting a wide variety of different events coming up. And so I just wanted to let everyone know about some of those. They’re all available. If you go to our website at W three w the number three c i NC comm forward slash events, and you’ll be able to go ahead and find those. So first and foremost, we have our last roundtable of the year, that’ll be on December 1. So you know, and is that next week? Now? It’s I don’t know the date. Either way,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 33:31

I think it’s I think it’s the next week or the week after. And so on 12 one, which will be Tuesday. So today is the 23rd. So Tuesday, the first Yes, next week, Tuesday. At noon, we’ll be hosting our final our roundtable of the year, we’ll be talking about planning for 2021 and discussing those elements. So if you want to go to W three c i nc.com forward slash events, and go ahead and find those events there. We’re also doing a webinar. I’m trying to find my notes. Sorry, I lost my notes here. We’re, there we go. We have a Oh, so we just started the weapon beyond webinars. And those are my twice monthly webinars that I’ll be doing on a variety of different topics. Those are a longer format, a little bit more strategy and tutorial based ones. And they’re going to cover a wide variety of topics. And one that I just did was on Google workspace for small business. So if anybody’s interested in learning more about the Google Productivity Suite, and how you can use that for marketing and managing your business, you can go ahead and check out the Google workspace for small business. We’re going to be doing a whole series of redos of other webinars that I’ve done to update them to the Google workspace interface now. So I’ll be going over Google sites and Google Drive and Google Calendar and Google, you know, Gmail, all kinds of other tools over the course of next year on 12 three, which is the third next Thursday, after our roundtable on Tuesday on Thursday. I’ll be doing my annual small business digital marketing in 2021, basically, my urine review, you’re in preview episode show. And so I’ll be covering all the various pieces of trends that have been happening in the marketing world. So you can go ahead and check that out. I’ll on 1217, then do our final web and beyond webinar of 2020, which will be lessons from a year going live. In essence, I wanted to talk through, you know, all the things that I learned from going ahead and doing this live every week. And with all of the warts and all, there has been such really great pieces of of doing this, and some parts that I think I could do better. And as well, I’m looking forward to, you know, growing this, this weapon beyond live as we go into 2021. And I wanted to kind of educate folks on some of the things that I learned and sharing those along the way. Robin is noting that she loved this episode. Thanks, Robin. And as a beginner on this subject, she’ll be rewatching this episode a few times. And so she was thanking me, you’re welcome. And she can’t wait for the story on stories, and loves the idea of the checklist. All good things, Robin, thank you. Thank you. And thank you. And you’re welcome. And I hope to get that together as soon as I can. Also everybody, if you need to, you can check out if you want to, you can check out our new community at web and beyond dot community, make sure you use the www www dot web and beyond community that will take you to the community, all the events that I noted earlier, also embedded there. So if you’re a member of the community, you can just RSVP RSVP to many of these events directly in there. I think the webinars do require you to register an event right notwithstanding. So we have some centralization of the webinar pieces, but you can see all of the events and add them to your calendar from there. Quick note, I’m only going to do this a few more times. But healthcare.gov still has open enrollment, if you don’t have insurance, and you’re looking for insurance, or if you’re trying to get insurance for employees or otherwise, where you don’t provide insurance for them. Because of the size of your business, go ahead and get open enrollment applications in. I think it’s through 1215 that they’re open. So you can go ahead and get health coverage for 2021 and healthcare.gov. And just you know, this is a tough time for everybody. And as I keep saying each week, it’s important for us all to be helping each other. So spread the word that healthcare.gov is still open and active and working and everybody should be, you know, getting themselves insured. With that. That brings me to the end of my time with you all today. And if you enjoyed the livestream, please click the thumbs up icon that helps us bring new small business friends into the fold. And so thank you for doing that. You have a question leave a comment. You can tweet or message me via at W three w the number three consulting on Twitter. And we’re back here Monday, every week at 11am. Eastern. And thanks so much for sending this weapon beyond live with me. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith on behalf of W three Consulting and our subsidiary, WCC web services. Have a great week ahead marketing and managing your small business on the web and beyond. Take care everybody.