360DigitalInfluence

What is “Facebook Stories”?

This July, Facebook announced that it had passed the 500 million user milestone. Along with this announcement, Facebook also rolled out a new application, “Facebook Stories,” to celebrate its achievement.  As the largest social network in the world, stories of how people are interacting with others on Facebook happen every day. However, these stories usually end up only on Facebook Status Updates and News Feed, where limited users (i.e.friends) can access.

By launching Facebook Stories, users are able to share their unique stories in a collective environment, and all users can read these stories searchable by location or theme. Themes cover a variety of topics such as education, relationships, reunions, love etc. and after reading a couple stories, I would add some are quite inspiring and mind-opening. While various people use Facebook to keep in touch with old friends, others have clearly allowed Facebook to become a part of their lives.

How Brands use Facebook Stories Tab

In addition to the Facebook Stories site, Facebook is currently partnering with 31 fan pages, which associates a certain brand to many of the Facebook Stories tabs. LIVESTRONG, for instance, highlights health-related stories on its Facebook fan page; The Knot, a leading wedding service company, highlights Facebook users’ love stories. While these stories do not relate to the brand itself, they do represent a philosophy behind it, or the mission of its particular cause. Through these stories, content on fan pages become more engaging and fans are more likely to spend more time thinking about or visiting the brand. At the same time, these Facebook Stories allows the brand to see a glimpse of what stories people like to share. In turn, the brand may tailor its engagement plan to cross promote its page and Facebook Stories.

Since Facebook Stories is now available to any developer, I believe that more brand pages will link up with this new application to establish greater consumer engagement and brand awareness.

So, what is your story?