Dive Brief:

• Mashable reports that Facebook is using Poland to test Messenger Day, a service similar to Snapchat. Stories in the social media giant's messaging app will allow users to combine photos and video along with text, stickers and doodles to send messages that last 10 seconds in feeds and disappear after 24 hours.
• Facebook previously rolled out an Instagram Stories feature in August that largely mimicked Snapchat's central platform, though the Instagram version included personalized suggestions driven by algorithms, something that Snapchat has avoided.
• Messenger Day is being tested in Poland, and a local social media agency founder described the interface as “poor” and “nothing like Instagram Stories,” further noting that the stickers were clearly targeted for a young demographic because they were full of colors as well as being “big, noisy (and) really invasive," per the Mashable story.

Dive Insight:

Facebook is ever more keenly aware of Snapchat’s meteoric rise – the latter's user growth is expected to hit 27% this year – and Messenger Day replicating the competitor's signature 24-hour feed format is a bold move. Messenger is one way that Facebook is pushing into the messaging app space, where consumers are spending much of their time online. 

Overall, Facebook's growth rate has been slowing and the company is struggling to reach younger consumers, an attractive marketing demographic but one that does not necessarily want to be active on a platform that is popular with older consumers. 

Given Snapchat's winning formula with youth, Facebook is liberally borrowing from its playbook. 

Instagram Stories is also a near carbon copy of Snapchat aside from the suggestions that tap into Facebook’s user database. Early reviews of the new service from the Mashable source do position Messenger Day as distinct enough from Instagram Stories, though not in a positive way. 

But complaints about Day's "big, noisy (and) really invasive" features being clearly targeted at a younger demographic might be a smart move given the importance of winning over Gen Z loyalty early. 

A Bloomberg report from August interestingly found analysts stating that Snapchat’s rise has a much greater impact on Twitter’s ad revenue than Facebook’s. If Facebook sees things the same way, adding Snapchat-like features in its various properties indicates it’s more concerned about losing app users to Snapchat than it is about losing ad dollars — at least for now.