With Facebook stories getting a lot of attention lately, the social media giant has decided to make them stay for longer to increase story views.
Reverse engineering expert Jane Wong found out that Facebook has been working on a new option that would allow stories to last for up to 3 days which normally disappears after 24 hours.
This goes against the main concept of the format but apart from users getting more views, this new option might appeal to the older users who are new to the platform.
Facebook stories have around 500 million users now but that still doesn't beat how well the option has worked for Instagram, besides Facebook has around 1.66 billion active users daily so the usage of Stories is far less than what Facebook would want. And perhaps, the new option would drive in more uses to the format.
The Stories format continues to become popular and according to many observers, it might defeat the news feed posts. Facebook also foresees stories as the future of social sharing so getting more users onboard on the format beforehand makes sense. This could only be possible if existing users show more interest in it, and maybe if they lasted longer, Stories could get the attraction Facebook is looking for. We can't say if it would actually work but it seems to be worth the experiment.
From a marketing point of view, it can be risky, cluttering all your promotional offers on top of users' feeds. Perhaps, you can use it to highlight limited-time offers or special deals that would last for three days, we can expect people to get accustomed and creative with the new option.
Facebook hasn't shared any information regarding this but given Jane Wong's history of discoveries, we can expect it to be out in a month or so.
