Facebook Stories
In their constant search for improvement, Facebook keeps introducing new mechanics to help brands and people interact with their followers through the short format video tool.
Nevertheless, it’s an undeniable fact that Facebook Stories are not having the success that was expected, regardless of their extensive efforts to compete with Instagram and Snapchat’s solid market.
Making this another reason for Facebook to go even further developing audience engagement tools for brands. This time around they picked a very interesting one: stickers.
Social Media expert Matt Navarra mentioned in a tweet that stickers would include: buying, booking, calling and getting addresses.
We at Garritz also found out that they also include surveys and an “apply now” function, which would be a Click-to-site feature.
Interestingly enough, several users found out that you could place hyperlinks on stories, fact that Facebook did not announce at all, which leads us to believe that it’s one of the many features that have been deployed in these past months as beta testing.
Facebook Stories is yet to find it’s niche
There’s still a very important question in the air, is Facebook Stories really worth the while?
We couldn’t say no due to the platform immense size, however, it’s important to keep these numbers in mind.
In September 2018, Facebook reported that Stories had reached the 300 million daily user milestone, this contemplated both Facebook general app and Messenger itself.
Compared to Instagram Stories’ 400 million daily users, we can see they were quite successful with their audience.
But when we compare this user range with the actual size of Facebook’s demography, it’s easier to see how their growth has actually been slow and well against initial expectations.
The numbers are not pretty, 300 million users for a 3.5 billion user platform means that only 1.1% of Facebook’s users are actually using Stories.
Instagram Stories keeps evolving
Meanwhile, Instagram Stories continues to enjoy great success and as expected, they brought brand new tools for 2019: a countdown and the expansion of a very popular tool, the question stickers that you can now use during a live broadcast.
The social media owned by Facebook has enjoyed a rapid exponential growth since they added short videos and they still hold an ace under their sleeve: the language of this generation.
In Instagram Stories, creating great copys or having a big focus on narrative is not necessary at all. Turning your camera on and talking straight to your audience is more than enough.
The exhibition of everyday experiences and common language, has made more and more people look at these stories and replicate the most popular formulas for their audience.
A clear example of this happened at the very end of 2017 with “my year at instagram” in which users uploaded a story with a picture they uploaded for every month of the year and a brief description of its importance.
This formula was adopted by thousands of users, creating copycats and memes from critics of this trend as well.
What are brands doing with Stories?
Crazy as it sounds, brands have yet to decide in what way stories should be properly used.
According to data by Socialbakers, the difference between how many stories are uploaded against publications is just 8%.
However, we must have remember the way publications and stories work on their own. The fact that stories last a few seconds and disappear 24 hours later places them in a whole different game.
We must think in terms of reach and engagement, this last one being the greatest strength of Stories, it’s also important to remember that the content that users remember the most is in video format.
Snapchat losing ground
There’s no doubt that Snapchat made the short video format what we know now.
However, they’ve stayed behind in the social media innovation race.
While Instagram was the first to bring that idea to their platform, Snapchat has almost entirely dedicated to copying the updates of those who adopted their methods.
One after the other, Instagram’s tools like the Selfie format and the chain posts have also been deployed at Snapchat, to this date, they still are being tested.
Snapchat also started looking for other niches to fit in, starting with the implementation of filters for dogs and cats, that contrary to the company’s opinion, are not very popular.
The other market they’ve decided to focus on is at challenges.
Viral material like the Ice Bucket Challenge or the Kiki Challenge
Snapchat created tools that make it easier to challenge more people.
This tool is still quite new and remains in beta testing, time will tell if it was a good move or not.
Which one is better?
In the current state of things, it’s hard to pick one of them as “the best”. It’s really a matter of two factors: the brand and the target audience.
Each brand must know where to find their users, in other words: which one has the most engagement? Be it Gen Z, Millennials or Gen X, although they all consume video content, they don’t do it the same way or in the same platforms.
This year’s tendency is strong toward localized and well-segmented content. For these reasons we encourage you to try here and there and see what works for you and what doesn’t.
sources:
www.socialmediatoday.com
www.techcrunch.com
www.socialbakers.com