A Story About Facebook Stories
Once upon a time, a smidgen of Mark’s wealth vanished away. Head of an empire, Mark was not surprised to lose part of his fortune. Actually, this was all part of Mark’s world-conquering plan.
Back in the summer, the social media giant went through one of the biggest one-day losses in US corporate history. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, was reported to have lost more than £11.5bn in one day. The reason for this? A new chapter in the Facebook tale.
Facebook has restricted its newsfeed ads and has moved some focus to Stories. While the format doesn’t currently bring in as much revenue as its more established counterpart, the bet is surely worth taking if the last five years are anything to go on.
What’s the Stories?
It all began back in 2013. Snapchat, an app with a camera at its heart, designed a tool which allowed its users to create a narrative from a collection of images and short videos. Named Stories, the format was unique in that posts would only have a lifespan of 24 hours. Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat, said: “we learned that creativity can be suppressed by the fear of permanence, but also empowered through ephemerality.”
With point-and-shoot now more accessible than ever, the environment was ripe for Snapchat users to neglect the use of text. Instead, what they saw could be captured, edited and shared, creating a makeshift story for all of their friends to see.
Enter, Instagram Stories
Like most good stories, this tale contains foreshadowing. In August 2016, Facebook-owned Instagram introduced Stories in response to their users taking great pride in curating their personal feeds so as to reflect their personal aesthetic.
The new format was placed at the top of the app, inviting users to post to an audience made up of their existing social network. Now boasting 400 million daily users, the radical implementation has produced an engaged audience and now offers an effective way to speak to customers.
With this platform, though, it is more important than ever to adapt to the environment, a lesson learned quickly by The Guardian. Initially, their posts were tv-quality videos with high set up costs and did not generate the engagement they would have liked. They later adopted a form of native advertising, using short-video explainers and static graphics on news topics — fun content which is easy to make. By adapting to their surroundings, the news outlet has seen their Instagram account grow from 860,000 to one million followers over the last four months.
The Climax of the Story — Facebook Stories
To go forward you must go back, an ethos certainly practised by Facebook as of late. As the Newsfeed begins to reach its limit, the tech giant has planted the seed for the latest addition to paid-social advertising.
A change to the Newsfeed’s algorithm earlier in the year means that brands struggle to reach users organically and instead must rely on sponsored content in order to reach users on the platform. This is all part of Facebook’s desire to make the feed a place of “meaningful interactions” and consequently a shift away from newsfeed-focused advertising.
Introducing a new character to the tale, Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer of Facebook recently announced that “the Stories format is on a path to surpass feeds as the primary way people share things with their friends sometime next year.” A prediction with stats to support it, the consulting firm Block Party stated: “since early 2016 Stories creation and its consumption is up 842%.”
The Plot Thickens
On the brink of a visual communication era and a filling newsfeed, Facebook is shifting users towards Stories despite them monetising at “materially lower” rates than the Newsfeed, Brian Nowak of Morgan Stanley states. He believes that Facebook “will now need to increase its execution around stories engagement and ad innovation.”
With the introduction of Spotify and GoPro on Facebook Stories through third-party app integration, the foundations are set for our vertical protagonist. Perfect for brand-building exercises, the price to advertise through Stories is currently lower than to advertise on the Newsfeed.
And they all lived happily ever after
Perhaps the story is missing a Liam Neeson, David vs Goliath or even a frog-kissing princess, but the potential of Stories means there’s always a chance of a sequel.
A high degree of its success can be attributed to the short lifespan, giving users the freedom to post how they wish without the worry of an old post being quoted against them if they were to become Prime Minister (you never know). Once the feature was introduced to Instagram and the engagement it produced could be analysed, it was only a matter of time before Zuckerberg adopted and monetised Stories on the biggest of all social media platforms.
With ads at the heart of Facebook’s growth, Stories will allow them to create an environment which both elicits the greatest possible connection and allows their revenue model to flourish. Even if it does temporarily mean losing some loose change.
The end.
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