The Beginning…

Here’s where you should introduce the idea, competition or takeover. It might sound glaringly obvious, but starting your Story the right way can drastically improve engagement rates. This is even more important now that Snapchat Stories auto-play one after the other. Adding one or two short intro frames is like a book-end that keeps your content together and makes it easy for people to tune in throughout the day.

‍

The Middle…

This part is the meat in the sandwich, and everyone knows that the meat-to-sandwich ratio is a fine art to master. There isn’t one defining rule for how many Snaps make up the middle of a Story - the most important consideration is how interesting your content is. For example, 10 Snaps showing 10 aspects of an awesome music festival might seem short. Whereas 10 almost identical, dialogue-heavy frames of someone’s breakfast can seem like a marathon effort to watch.

Do:

Feature a variety of different angles, keep the copy brief, and show off the meaty bits.

Don’t:

Rely too heavily on sound, double-up shots, or make calls to action complicated to follow.

The End…

Often overlooked, the end of a Snapchat Story is an opportunity to close the loop and leave your followers looking forward to the next one. Consider wrapping a live Story with a “Bye & Thanks” frame, or finishing off a weekly feature by teasing next week’s content or competition. Your end Snaps don’t have to be super complicated - and could even be a standardised frame across multiple Stories. If your content lives on other channels, you can use the end-frame to direct your followers to these channels for more traffic or engagement at multiple sites.

‍