10 Social Media Storytelling Tips from Disney [Part 1]

Marketing Happy Hour

Ally and I debrief a recent guest essay from Jonathan Hurwitz, Emmy-nominated writer and creative consultant from Rachel Karten’s Substack, Link in Bio. Jonathan spent 10 years writing at Disney - and through this essay, shares how to apply his learnings from Disney to social media marketing. In part 1 of this 2-part episode, we discuss the first 5 storytelling tips from the essay and break down real-world social media applications you can test and learn with your brand’s social presence.

Key Takeaways:

Tip 1 // If you don’t have stakes, you don’t have a story. Add stakes to any story makes the audience care about the characters they’re watching.

Tip 2 // Shapes can elicit feelings. Create feeling and understanding with your audience through auditory and/or visual tools.

Tip 3 // You can’t get surprise without expectation. That’s the core of drama. By teasing what’s coming in the video, you can help stop the doom scroll with wording like “wait until the end” or “wait for it.”

Tip 4 // The conflict is the story. There is tension created between want and need. Be clear about how you want to drive audience adoption and behavior through their wants and needs.

Tip 5 // TV has the ability to evolve over time, whereas movies just are. A brand’s “TV-show” style content keeps the audience engaged day-to-day while the “movies” give them something to look forward to and talk about in a bigger cultural moment.

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