Dive Brief:
- Facebook announced that it will soon bring its Stories feature to Pages, the fan-page platform for businesses, brands, news outlets and public figures, according to TechCrunch.
- The move aims to drum up users' interest in the feature and give brands and publishers the opportunity to directly interact with consumers on a more casual and social level. Facebook users will see Stories from Pages they follow in the top section of the mobile app or desktop browser for 24 hours before the Stories disappear.
- With the rollout, Pages administrators can utilize Facebook's augmented reality camera effects to embed virtual filters, art and animations onto photos and videos of the real world for fans to view. TechCrunch pointed out that Facebook has yet to share a daily user metric for Stories, though a similar feature on Facebook-owned Instagram reeled in 100 million daily users just two months after its August launch last year and has grown its audience to 250 million since.
Dive Insight:
Facebook Stories has received its share of flack for not gaining much traction with users and also becoming more intrusive in News Feed as Facebook tries to correct for that lack of interest. The social giant's push to incorporate Stories into Pages might encourage more adoption and help replicate the success of Instagram Stories, which has grown to surpass its obvious inspiration Snapchat's daily user base of 173 million.
It's unclear whether brands will utilize Facebook Stories for Pages. TechCrunch speculated that it might appeal more to news publishers and entertainment personalities as a way to directly speak to their audiences, while brands could take the approach of pushing more branded content to Facebook's 2 billion-plus users. Stories, which first went into beta in the U.S. in March, fits snugly into Facebook's growing emphasis on video content with a mobile focus and also rides on the popularity of Snapchat, an app that's often cited as popularizing the ephemeral image-messaging format.
While Facebook is working to make its core platform more video- and visually-oriented, both Instagram and Snapchat are channels that have been built from the ground up to accommodate that type of social sharing, while Facebook is not. This could help explain why users generally don't appear to be interested in using Facebook's suite of AR-centric offerings like Stories.
