Users of Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat will be familiar with the concept of ‘stories’. They are collections of visually led content, where the user journey is navigated by tapping to cycle through pages, rather than scrolling down a single lengthy page.
The limitation with social media stories is that they are only accessible via their respective social media apps and in the case of Instagram, the stories are removed after 24 hours.
Recognising the popularity of the story format, Google has introduced AMP Stories, bringing the format to the open web, in both mobile and desktop format.
The ease of viewing a story on the mobile web has become a significant part in the way each user absorbs information. Facts show that at least 62% of weekly mobile content users embrace clickable stories every single day on social media.
Like AMP pages, AMP Stories are served from Google’s own CDN and load much faster than regular pages.
Google also give preferential treatment to the display of stories in search, with Story results being shown in prime position, in container format complete with image and an icon to set it apart from standard results.
Publishers have welcomed the new format as Google have made every effort to ensure that creative and appealing visual stories can be easily made and published. The AMP Story framework allows for combinations of video, imagery text, multiple layers, animations and animated GIFs.
AMP stories can help to improve your storytelling efforts, boost page speeds, improve your site's creative design, visual storytelling, and will also help with your SEO efforts.
Google’s force, towards creating a rich mobile experience that’s less taxing on software, hardware, and the human eye is clear. Google has been increasingly incorporating more images and video in its search results, and AMP stories are a continuation of that endeavour.
Forrester carried out an online survey of 2,062 US online users between the ages of 18 to 65, who consume publisher content every week from their mobile device. Forrester found that 64% of respondents preferred the clickable mobile web story format over its scrolling article equivalent.
Here are some key results from the study:
• 74% of smartphone users read or view social stories at least weekly. The demand for consuming social stories is higher than consumers’ desire to share their own stories.
• 84% of users felt tappable stories met or exceeded their expectations for ease of navigation. Consumers were also 1.4x more likely to find the method of navigating the tappable story appealing, compared to its scrolling equivalent.
• Over 75% of users are at least somewhat interested in reading tappable stories in their most-read content categories.
As the Forrester Study suggests, there is a unique opportunity for publishers to reach their audiences with a familiar clickable stories format. AMP Stories bring that format to the open web and allow publishers to take control of their content without being confined to a single ecosystem.
The iCentric Agency specialise in consulting, developing and supporting digital transformation software solutions for aspiring businesses.
You can read more about us here and more about our success stories at https://icentricagency.com/stories