Overview 

This guide will show you how to quickly turn your community messages into a social media story. This guide will look at using Canva, a free graphic design tool, and Twitter, but it will also suggest other combinations of free mobile and digital tools that you might use.

On social media, stories use images, text, recorded audio, video, animation, music, to create visually powerful, simple, and impactful messages.  Not every post should be a story, but the format can be used strategically to share meaningful events or processes.

Stories on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms will help you share important content and trigger calls to action. It’s a great way to share information, experiences and really connect with your audience.

By the end of this guide you should be able to take community quotes from phone calls or text messages, emails or surveys, and combine them creatively with graphics from a free library online, and save them as images before posting them as a thematic ‘thread’ on Twitter.

 

Tools you will need

 

  • Access to a laptop / mobile phone
  • A word processor
  • Canva
  • A Twitter or social media account

 

Step-by-Step

 

 

Step 1 – Plan the Story 

Before starting the design, first outline all the text and images for the story in a document. This will help you keep organised, and let you copy and paste the text when designing the individual slides.

The document should include:

    • The text / quote / message for each story slide.
    • The images to use in each story slide.
    • A short general introduction for the story to use in the first tweet.
    • All the hashtags to use in the tweet.

Once you have the content ready, let’s get started with the design in Canva.

 

Step 2 – Designing the Story on Canva 

Use this link to register for a free account with Canva.

Canva is a graphic design platform, used to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents, and other visual content.

Once you’re logged in, use the search bar to navigate to ‘Twitter Post Templates’.  Canva offers many ready-made template designs for you to use, or you can start a new blank project.

Selecting a pre-made template can save time and still allows you to edit all the fonts, colours, and images.

In the canvas view, you can get creative and add and edit all the elements you need to create your story. Most importantly, make sure it’s easy to read and gets your message across clearly.  Some of the features to be aware of are:

    • Adding new pages as you need.
    • Uploading your own images.
    • Using video and animation to make your stories more dynamic.

Once you are happy with the design, you can save the files, they will be downloaded all at once in a Zip file. For posting on social media, the files should be saved as PNG or JPEG.

 

Step 3 – Sharing Online 

With the image file ready, it’s time to post them on twitter. Unlike just a single post, we’ll use a new feature called Threads to connect all the posts together.  Twitter has provided this instructional video here for you to use.

When creating your tweets, use the description of the story for the first post. You can use text for the other images, or just post them as an image.

Remember to use the correct Hashtags for the main post description.

To help your audience read the whole story, we recommend labeling each tweet in the right order, so – 1/10, 2/10, 3/10  so they understand how many to read.

Once you are ready, you can post all the stories at once!

 

Step 4 – Monitoring & Replying  

Now your story is live and being seen, don’t forget to monitor any notifications for replies, likes, and shares to see who is engaging with the story.

You can pin the story to be featured top of your feed to highlight it for new visitors.

Include a Call to Action on the post, to encourage people to connect with your community.

You can use analytics to track how many people have seen the story.