Facebook Stories Will Surpass Newsfeed for User Generated Content

Facebook’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox says stories are on track to beat newsfeed posts as the main way users share content.

Stories are growing 15 times faster in terms of engagement than newsfeeds – uploads and views are up over 800% since 2016.

Facebook Stories has revealed it now has over 150 million daily active users, and will soon begin testing ads on stories in Brazil, Mexico and America.

The new integrated ads will be between 5 and 15 seconds long, skippable and full screen. Facebook will add click-through functionality in the coming months.

Mark Zuckerberg has said “making sure that ads are as good in Stories as they are in feeds. If we don’t do this well, then as more sharing shifts to Stories, that could hurt our business.”  

His firm is said to be testing out different sized stories tiles.

Pioneer Snapchat now has around 190 million daily active users, Instagram Stories has around 300 million, and WhatsApp Stories has some 450 million.

TechCrunch journalist Josh Constine speculates that stories represent ‘social media bedrock’ – while newsfeeds / Twitter feeds only give a glimpse of other people’s lives, stories can give close to the full picture as is possible.

This is because they integrate audio, video, text and other bells and whistles, giving users total freedom in how they share a moment.

He says: “What comes next is a race for more decorations, more augmented reality, more developers, and more extendability beyond native apps and into the rest of the web.

“Until we stop using cell phones all together, we’ll likely see most of sharing divided between private messaging and broadcasted Stories.”

Read more here.