Product Spotlight: Stories Widget

In 2013, social media platform Snapchat came up with a new way to share content on social media in the form of ‘Stories’—an interactive feature allowing a succession of videos and images to be stitched together and available for other users to view for up to 24 hours.

Since then, this form of storytelling has become a wildly popular medium for both users and brands. Fast-forward to 2016, when Instagram launched their own competing version of this feature. It was quickly adopted across the Instagram user base and entered the mainstream as one of the primary ways we share content about our everyday lives. Today, this format of storytelling is now prevalent across Facebook, Youtube, Google AMP, Twitter and LinkedIn.

But the ability to share these types of visual stories shouldn’t be limited to the big social platforms. Individual brands can now create visual UGC Stories on their own websites with Stackla’s new Stories Widgets.

With our Stories Widgets, brands can take advantage of this highly engaging media sharing format by embedding a Stories-style UGC gallery on their website. It works much like Stories features on social platforms do in that visitors can click on, view media and even shop from the images and videos that your brand hand curates.

This new Stackla feature lets you now take user-generated posts directly from your most active platforms and feed them into an engaging Stories Widget on your website. The only difference is that these images won’t disappear after 24 hours. Since you take regular social posts and turn them into Stories Widget posts, this content will be live for web visitors to view as long as your brand wants the content to be there.

Content available for Stackla Stories Widgets

The great thing about having a Stories widget on your website is that you aren’t limited to content from just one social media platform. You can pull content from multiple social channels and even have people upload content directly to your site for use in Stories.

The content types this widget is optimized for include:

• Instagram images and videos (Feed videos, IGTV and Stories)
• YouTube Shorts
• TikTok videos
• Direct Upload images and videos

Key Stories Widget features

On your site, our Stories Widgets function similar to how users view and interact with them on social platforms like Instagram. The in-line view displays as a horizontal scroll of visual circles. As visitors cursor over the circles, the social network the image comes from, as well as any ShopSpot or product tag features, will be indicated (as seen in the example below).

These in-line Stories Widget features include:

• A maximum of 25 UGC tiles per widget
• Fully responsive to different screen sizes (desktop, mobile, tablet, etc.)
• Horizontal scroll (just like other Stories features on social media platforms)
• When visitors ‘hover’ over the widget it will automatically increase the size of the in-line tile
• Can display the social network the tile comes from as well as any related products if users want to click to buy

When a user clicks on a Stories tile, each UGC tile will display for 15 seconds before automatically playing the next tile, unless a user interacts with it, in which case it will pause.

Brands using Stories Widget can also include Stackla’s ShopSpot display in the expanded tiles—allowing brands to easily include CTAs for an improved user experience and shortened path to purchase.

Users on mobile and touch screens can easily swipe left and right to navigate their way through successions of Stories. By default, action buttons are included such as mute, close and navigate left/right.

Stories is Stackla’s first Widget that lives completely on the page where it has been embedded. This means that brands using the Stackla Stories Widget can manipulate and influence the look and feel of how Stories displays with CSS and JS on the parent page. This way, you can have the widget display in a way that best suits your branding style.

Plus, this widget supports insights through Google Analytics. Brands can track the following metrics when using the Stackla Stories Widget:

• Number of widget loads
• Tile Hover (new just for this Widget)
• Number of tile loads
• Tile Impressions
• Shopspot impressions
• Shopspot interactions

The Stories Widget also works with other Stackla features such as our Tracking Pixel and will feed into the existing Stackla Analytics Dashboard.

Stackla’s new Stories Widget offers yet another way for brands to create a more interactive experience on their website while showcasing products and services in a fun and engaging way.

If you are interested in learning more about Stackla and our newest Stories Widget, fill out a demo form today and one of our team members will reach out to you. If you’re an existing Stackla customer, contact your dedicated customer success manager to start getting Stories Widgets live on your site!