Creators everywhere have embraced stories, the new tappable storytelling format made up of videos, GIFs, images, text and other visual elements. Audiences love engaging with stories content — and the best part is that they’re not just limited to social platforms. Web Stories are available on the open web, meaning they’re crawlable by search engines and you can share them — and link to them — just like any other webpage. Web Stories also don’t automatically disappear and can stay live as long as you like.
It’s easy to create your own Web Story — and takes just five steps. Here’s a deeper look at the process.
A visual editor is a program that enables you to produce and customize your photos, videos and graphics. They often come with simple functionality and built-in templates, so you don’t need to be an expert at video editing or design to make beautiful and engaging content. Web Stories for WordPress, MakeStories and Newsroom AI are just a few examples that might work for you. See more suggestions here.
The best Web Stories tell a complete narrative from the moment they are published to keep the reader engaged. Since all pages of a story are published at once, it’s important to think through the narrative of your Web Story in the same way you would for a blog post or video.
Although the creative process varies from person to person, we recommend outlining your Web Story in Google Docs. The Storytime team uses this script template to plan each page’s content and any text, videos, photos or animations we plan to use.
Choosing the right imagery or videos is essential to creating a compelling Web Story. This can be the most time-consuming task, but if you’ve been blogging, you probably already have videos or other images you can use. It’s important to remember all full-page videos should be formatted vertically. That way your Web Story will use less bandwidth and load more quickly.