If you want to forge long-lasting relationships with your brand’s target market, take a closer look at your short game. Ephemeral content—think rich media like images and video posted to platforms—is designed to appear for a short period of time before disappearing forever. Sound like a waste of good marketing collateral? Read on.

People love this stuff

The most obvious examples of ephemeral content are the posts you see in Facebook and Instagram Stories, and on Snapchat. The posts are short-lived, and audiences can’t get enough. 500 million people check out Instagram stories each day. And because successful campaigns keep the posts coming one after another, they keep the traffic flowing on these social platforms. Getting in on the ephemeral content game can greatly broaden a brand’s overall reach.

These posts don’t just get eyeballs; they create action

Things that are temporary create a sense of urgency. FOMO—fear of missing out—is an inherent aspect to ephemeral content, and it pushes viewers to take immediate responses. These might include making an impulse purchase, signing up for newsletters or notifications, or liking/sharing a post into virality.

And they invite audience participation

Because engaged audiences keep coming back for more, they develop a sense of affinity with the brands they follow. If you ask them to submit their own brand-related imagery—photos edited with custom filters or stickers or videos that respond to a prompt—you’ll have an influx of content that demonstrates your brand’s connectedness and relevancy.

And they provide opportunities to get personal

Snapchat and Facebook and Instagram Stories are great opportunities to share stories that don’t quite fit the narratives of larger campaigns. Day-in-the-life posts that demonstrate a company’s culture or give a behind-the-scenes look at the processes that make a product unique give audiences a greater feeling of familiarity—and perhaps even affinity—with the brand. This is an opportunity to build loyalty through transparency.

theCLIKK’s Take: Get in on the ephemeral content game but be prepared to publish on the reg. Like any organic strategy, it takes time. Don’t know where to start? You almost can’t go wrong with Instagram Stories. Here’s a good primer.

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