Facebook Plans Stories Updates to Drive Engagement

8th October 2018 Dominic Whitlock

Facebook is working on several ways to try and keep its Stories feature competitive with other platforms.

In terms of daily active users on Stories, TechCrunch reports that there are currently 450 million on WhatsApp, 400 million on Instagram and 300 million combined on Facebook and Messenger.

There is an expectation that by 2019 more people will be active on Facebook Stories than the News Feed. There is also more revenue available on adverts in Stories.

Therefore, it is in Facebook’s best interest to keep the feature afloat and turn it into a market leader.

Facebook has been spotlighting Stories at the top of a user’s feed for a while now, trying to encourage engagement.

Group and Events Stories have just been launched so friends can create collaborative memories from a special occasion, a feature that has been compared to Snapchat’s Our Stories.

Facebook will give users a chance to layer music over the top of their videos and give a soundtrack to their content. This update was originally added to Instagram and has already proved to be popular.

Finally, Birthday Stories is being tested with the hope that it can replace generic wall posts. Users will be encouraged to record a short video clip which will be automatically compiled into a longer visual for a friend’s birthday.

Rushabh Doshi, head of Stories at Facebook, told TechCrunch that they are constantly working on ways to update the feature and make it more interactive.

Doshi said: To help people keep up with smaller groups, we’re focused on ways people are already connecting on Facebook, such as Group Stories and Event Stories.

“We’re also looking at new ways people could share their stories with select groups of people.”