What Makes an Instagram Story a Persuasive Digital Story?: Evidencing through the Core Elements of Digital Storytelling

Abstract

The explosive growth of Web 2.0 technologies, such as social media, has given rise to new manifestations of digital storytelling. In contrast to traditional digital storytelling, new storytelling methods allow the incorporation of various media components into digital stories. As a result, the meaning of digital stories can be interpreted differently depending on the medium in which they are presented. Furthermore, digital storytelling can be translated into Web 2.0 media storytelling or sometimes as social media storytelling, which is becoming more exciting and vital as digital stories in such media grow exponentially. This study paves the way for investigating how the digital storytelling elements proposed by Lambert and Hessler (2018) manifest on Instagram stories, a popular social media tool, to make them persuasive digital stories. 3042 Instagram stories were observed from 15 influencers and sampled 500 digital stories. The sample stories were put through Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) to explore the elements. The findings are interpreted through the Extended Elaborative Likelihood model (E-ELM) and “Behaviour model in the context of online social networks” as to how the persuasion occurs through the identified elements. The results showed a significant alignment of Instagram stories with the core components of digital storytelling, making them persuasive. The findings are expected to justify the acceptability of using ephemeral social media stories as persuasive digital stories for academic and industrial endeavours.