Facebook Adds Stories to Your Mobile App

Chuck Forbes - April 10, 2017

If you predicted that Facebook would eventually adopt “stories” to their platform you were correct – and that prediction felt inevitable. Following suit with Instagram who released stories to their platform in 2016 – Facebook has updated their mobile application to now allow users the ability to post pictures and videos in a separate feed for their followers to view.

Here are the changes you will see in the Facebook app:

• The story news feed will live at the top of the main feed, just like Instagram.
• You can now privately message friends pictures or videos in what Facebook calls “Direct.”

Like SnapChat, these posts will last 24 hours before disappearing from your feed. You can also decorate your posts by adding filters, text or a chalk marker feature only available in Facebook.

Ideology to Consider

This roll-out further confirms the belief by social and tech leaders that picture and video communication is only going to grow larger. SnapChat took the industry by storm when they introduced this new way of speaking to friends and followers and it is important to understand moving forward. Marketers need to adopt strategies in their social advertisements that effectively communicate to people through images and video, especially if your demographic is teenagers or millennials.

It is also worth noting, that now you may have up to three platforms (SnapChat, Instagram and Facebook) in your social strategy that require daily maintenance and story posts. This over saturation could lead to one platform declining in story usage – therefore keeping an eye on trends is important – if you only limited resources, use the platform that gets the most engagement with your audience.

Facebook, Instagram and SnapChat may also have different audience groups that you market to and consume content slightly differently. If that is the case, test out stories on Instagram and Facebook, platforms that use the feature as a secondary form of posting and see if the engagement is worth keeping versus using SnapChat where users are only looking at a feed of stories or direct snaps.

It will be interesting to see how Facebook stories perform over time. Facebook has managed to stay relevant by keeping up with social trends and adopting them to their platform that features millions of users. Will this addition begin to turn users away prove to be too much? Or will Facebook stories take the lead in visual communication?