Not just Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn: recently Big G has also started investing in web stories thanks to Velvet Media, the Veneto online marketing and sales agency is the first to offer the landing pages of the future to SMEs. “We are the pioneers of the fastest way to communicate on the web, data collection is more effective”.
Revolution in the world of Story, a very popular social format on Instagram. After Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube have followed the Facebook giant, now Google closes the circle with the birth of the new format of “Web Stories”. To spread the new language, in recent months the US multinational has collaborated with over 30 publishers in India, Brazil and the USA. To date, there are already more than two thousand sites that have made use of Google tools and that also make use of artificial intelligence. With the entry of Big G, therefore, the world of Stories officially becomes the new backbone of web communication on a global level: not just social networks, soon they will be the normal language also on the web.
Velvet Media the first agency in Italy
In this innovative ecosystem, Velvet Media is the first agency in Italy and among the few in Europe to have already equipped itself with a business unit dedicated to managing the new world of Web Stories. “The format was created for communication on mobile phones”, explains Matteo Dario, marketing director at Velvet Media. “For a year now, the Italian market has also reached what we internally call“ media singularity ”: the number of smartphones per household has exceeded the number of televisions. Faced with this epochal turning point, it is logical that information, entertainment and consequently advertising must also hurry up in embracing even more immediate, almost instinctive formats, just like Web Stories. For this reason Velvet Media has accepted the challenge of Google and has introduced a series of solutions in its offer, including a story-plan that starts from social networks and reaches the web ".
It must be said that this is only the latest news that Velvet Media offers in its services, and it adds up to an offer that is much more complete: the stories can be used transversally on various social networks, on the web and also within stores and physical spaces by inserting vertical monitors. Therefore, it is a communicatively new approach that now also makes use of the strength of Big G. The world of social media has now taken this direction: it is estimated that over 970 million accounts post stories daily on Instagram (about half a billion stories, given Hootsuite November 2019), but also on Snapchat, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and that over 50% of companies create Instagram Stories every month (source: Martechcube.com).
Uses that a Web Story can have
It is used by a restaurant to propose the menu and refer to a page where the table is booked. Or to a company that wants to launch an offer and collect the data of those who join. Or it is also useful for describing and promoting a new product, with a direct link to the company e-commerce. “To demonstrate to Italian companies the effectiveness of the new Google product we have worked night and day in the last month, studying ad hoc communication plans for each product category ", he explains Andrea Ballan, Velvet Media project manager. “The contents that can be spread are many: from videos to photos, through text and music. An important fact is then that of the permanence of the reader, who once inside a Web Story stays there longer than on a normal landing page ".
From a technical point of view, the Web Stories in a company blog improve the seo and make the contents and highlights of the article more engaging, but they can also show previews on social networks and in the news release. They also play an important role in the collection of structured data, much higher than Instagram: you can collect questionnaires, profile contacts, track navigation hours and times, as well as record shares. Not only that, they allow more articulated dynamics of consumer engagement, the company can in fact post "votable" content by all users, but they can also redirect them to a E-commerce, promotional campaigns or even a tutorial. In fact, they become a kind of simplified corporate website.
The card - what are web stories
Web Stories take advantage of the AMP technology (Accelerated Mobile Pages) offered by Google to replace the old landing pages, created for the promotion of products and services at the same time as the collection of leads and traffic. The strong point is that the Web Stories are indexed and remain in the Search engine results page (in acronym Serp), ie the "search engine results page". Whenever a user performs a search with certain keywords, he can therefore end up not only on a website, but also within the Web Story, which therefore does not remain confined to Facebook or Instagram, but can appear on the Google results page. as if they were a site or an old landing page. Web Stories can be simple (customer images, title, text) or advanced (post-produced images, videos, animations, 3D).
AMP technology
The AMP technology, at the web structure level, is relatively simple and scalable as it provides "minimal and standard" HTML blocks and they get their speed thanks to the AMP pages, which are the flagship of Google to favor the speed of loading pages from mobile. To encourage the development of Web Stories, Google is rolling out a WordPress plugin. David Besbris, director of engineering at Google, to explain the historical turnaround said: "Whenever an article takes too long to load, the reader is lost." For this, the contents must be consumed at a glance, presented in portrait mode (to be viewed in full screen on mobile) and always contain text (minimum 24 and maximum 200 characters). The recommended size of a web story is between 4 and 30 pages.
Velvet Media, the origins
VELVET MEDIA Marketing management, online sales and new media: these are the areas in which the agency of Castelfranco Veneto (in the Treviso area) is at the top of the national level. Born as a publishing house in 2013, specializing first in couponing and then as editor of the website Stories of Excellence and of the magazine Genius, today Velvet is a holding company that manages outsourcing marketing on behalf of over a thousand companies in Northern Italy thanks to an ever-expanding staff of approximately 150 people. For this it was awarded as one of the fastest growing companies in Europe by the Financial Times.
The core business is the coordination of corporate communication at all levels and the management of online sales: from graphics to videos, from brand positioning to the development of e-commerce sites, from marketplace management to lead generation. Some parallel divisions have arisen around the Velvet galaxy, which have developed specializations in the world of sports (Velvet Sport), of fashion (Velvet Fashion) e internationalization with a particular focus on China (Velvet International).
With offices in the United States in Denver, Thailand in Bangkok and the United Arab Emirates in Dubai, Velvet is the ideal partner for any company interested in communicating and selling across borders. The story of Velvet Media is told in the book “Marketing Heroes”, in which the corporate style based on manga and rock and roll emerges. Information and contacts: www.velvetmedia.it.
Velvet Media Press Office
