Google's New Stories Platform

Move over Instagram and SnapChat, a new Stories platform is in town! Google launch "Stories" on the Discover platform in October of 2020. There has been little promotion about it so we are guessing that its probably still in beta and they aren't wanting marketing people to rush to the platform. We tend to inundate any new opportunities inside search engines. Marketers were about the only active users on Google+.

Stories may functionally look similar to its social siblings but it is very different. The biggest difference is that they don't own or host any of it! Stories is a standard they have set and allow any website to create and promote that content. When they index the site, the bots can recognize the format and potentially use it within Discover, Search, or Images.

This is a potentially huge change for Google. With the recent, massive success of TikTok and previously SnapChat, all tech companies are jumping on the visuals bandwagon. Just another way to reduce the amount of words we read, right? Pictures, video, graphics! These are the encouraged entities within your Stories, though you could make it entirely text as it is actual HTML just hosted on your site. It's that easy!

One of the major issues with social media is the limitation of creative control. Unless you could get approval through the platform, custom graphics or links were not an option. Now that this Story is simply code that sits on your existing site, that limitation doesn't exist. On a Wordpress site, you simply download Google's official Stories plugin, like I did, and in 10 minutes you could publish your first Story.

The actual long-term implications aren't as clear. We don't know if Google will keep the feature or just test it for another few months. Many programs pop in and out of the organization and their standard for retention must be very high if even Google+ didn't match the mark.

However, Stories is different. Unlike the social counterparts, every slide can have a link or two links or a hundred. Besides the general shape of a Story, it's completely in your control as Google says you "command every pixel." This is definitely an interesting development.

My main interest in this new platform lies within the world of marketing, SEO, and content creation. To this day, Google will always prioritize larger companies. Lawyer listing sites will outrank lawyers. Yelp will outrank local restaurants. While Google Maps is incredibly useful, this main emphasis given to corporate pages with lots of link-juice is extremely unfair. They may have no intention of changing that. Why should they? It's the big companies that pay more in ads as well.

My hopes are that socially engaging, visual content, and contextual matching might have more sway in Stories. I'd like to hope that my Stories show up in the Google Discover of a business owner looking for marketing services. It might be wishful thinking but we desperately need a more open, creative and fair internet.

Check out my Story about Huntsville Web Design Carl is the owner of Zellus Marketing of Hutnsville, AL