Why social media is taking a storyline approach

If a picture paints a thousand words, then a dozen of them digitally threaded together to portray related scenes with a beginning, a middle, and an end creates an online story. With users increasingly hungry for new content, the tech geniuses behind top social media sites are finding ways to make them see familiar faces and scenes but from a very different and ultimately engaging perspective.

Instagram’s Spotlight lets users view the videos that did not make it to the final cut during the actual concert, performance, or gala night. Tech Crunch describes this content curation as showing the behind-the-scenes that top all behind-the-scenes. For example, if all the Grammy Awards showed on TV was Taylor Swift’s acceptance of her trophy, Spotlight opens the curtains to show the small, endearing bits and pieces that led to that one big unforgettable instance.

About 55 video clips will weave together the nervous, nail-biting minutes when her entourage was chatting about her chances of winning; the oh-so-cool occasions when the lady gamely saying that the best artist will win. Then, it went to that thrilling and human attention-grabber when Swift and her fans shrieked with delight in her dressing room once she was announced as the winner. Instagram’s Spotlight makes the user feel special by placing that one special trophy acceptance speech in the rest of its glamorous, spellbinding context.

Those scenes will be forever embedded in viewers’ memory, and they could have been called “moments” had Twitter not made its own brand out of that word. According to Tim Biggs, the tech columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, Twitter is emerging from its microblogging corner to curate content that links pictures, videos, and tweets to re-tell news stories in a fresh and exciting way.

Twitter’s team of online journalists find content items that are trending, popular, unique, and potentially newsworthy and piece them together to make an event more real and relevant to a follower who is used to reading only a few lines on his page. The most important “moments” come up in four categories: news, entertainment, sports and fun.

For example, if a user is following something as mundane as traffic on a Monday morning rush, Twitter will feature different videos and photos showing the crowded areas in the city which the user may want to avoid. The tweets of exasperated commuters and diligent traffic cops will also comfort the user a little at the thought that others are sharing their plight.

People who digest online content do not operate from a vacuum, says Dom Einhorn, the CEO and founder of the business and news site Born2Invest. Every day, dozens of international journalists file on real-time breaking stories on a wide range of business topics, from real estate, the stock market, oil and gas, business and finance, to fashion, film and entertainment.

“There is a pattern once you look at the habits of our customers who read our site from all parts of the globe,” says Einhorn. “They view the news as one big, interlinking story. The single mother who reads the latest update on milk products also lists fitness-related articles. Dig a little deeper and you can see the connection in the way she takes care of her children and the way she keeps herself healthy. The same is also true of the banker who always clicks on the property development category first, and finance second. In his mind, his investments in real estate will support how he makes money in stocks. The interests of our users do create a storyline — theirs, and what interests them. ”

The social media site that surprised everyone by curating content, instead of deleting it, is Snapchat with its Story Explorer. The Next Web says that Snapchat is leveraging on its hundreds of unique, real-time photos to show multiple perspectives of events as popular as the Oscars to something as homegrown and yet as important as a shopping spree in a mall.

The spontaneity by which the photos were taken, without any of the editing that happened in Instagram’s Spotlight, makes the experience more real to the user. There is a grittiness to the shots of the streets or an indifference the way the camera caught a celebrity grinning like a school girl with her best buddies. The attraction here is the seeming lack of attempt to doll things up; what you see is what you get, even those movie idols you have put on a pedestal.

Content curation elevates the stream of photos and videos to an experience that accepts the user as part of its world. Photos make us glimpse an event; the storytelling, that Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat weaves, invites us to become a part of it.