It's a new Facebook feature called Stories, and it's an imitation of a popular feature on rival app Snapchat.Facebook previously added Stories to Instagram, but this latest roll out on its core.
By Jiayi Wen, Engineer, and Shengbo Guo, Engineer
We’re always listening to our community to understand how we can improve their experience of News Feed. We’ve heard from people that it’s frustrating to click on a link that leads to a slow-loading webpage. In fact, even more broadly on the internet, we’ve found that when people have to wait for a site to load for too long, they abandon what they were clicking on all together. As many as 40 percent of website visitors abandon a site after three seconds of delay.
During the coming months we’re making an update to News Feed to show people more stories that will load quickly on mobile and fewer stories that might take longer to load, so they can spend more time reading the stories they find relevant.
Taking Loading Time Into Account With this update, we’ll soon take into account the estimated load time of a webpage that someone clicks to from any link in News Feed on the mobile app. Factors such as the person’s current network connection and the general speed of the corresponding webpage will be considered. If signals indicate the webpage will load quickly, the link to that webpage might appear higher in your feed.
For years, we have taken many factors into account to make sure people quickly see relevant stories to them — including the type of device you’re on or the speed of your mobile network or wifi connection. For example, if you are on a slower internet connection that won’t load videos, News Feed will show you fewer videos and more status updates and links. And to help load stories faster for people on slow or poor network connections, we prefetch stories by downloading mobile content before someone clicks a link, which we’ve seen can shorten load time for webpages by more than 25%.
Will This Impact My Page? This update will roll out gradually over the coming months. We anticipate that most Pages won’t see any significant changes to their distribution in News Feed. Webpages that are particularly slow could see decreases in referral traffic. To help webpages avoid experiencing potential decreases, we’re sharing tips to help site owners make their site faster and more mobile-friendly. See here for publisher best practices for improving mobile site load time.
As always, publishers should keep in mind these basic guideposts to reach their audience on Facebook and continue to post stories that are relevant to their audiences and that their readers find informative.
Facebook Stories was launched earlier this year but it didn’t make much impact compared to stories on its other app Instagram. But that is not stopping Facebook from trying to promote it. To get more people to use Facebook stories, they rolled out the ability to share Instagram stories on Facebook directly. This move made good sense as there are over 300 million people already using Instagram stories. Recently, Facebook released story feature for Brands. Previously it was only possible to post a story as your personal account but now you can do it for the pages, you’re an admin of. Here we have listed simple steps to upload Stories as a Facebook page.
If you own a Facebook page for personal use or to promote your business/brand then the new feature is going to be quite useful for you. From now on, it is possible to upload stories from your page. Here’s how.
Upload Stories As Facebook Page
Similar to stories uploaded on the personal timeline you can only post stories on Facebook pages using their Android or iOS app. Before proceeding ahead update the app to the latest version from the respective app stores.
Open the Facebook app and go the desired page timeline.
Below the Write something… box you should see Your Page’s Story. Tap on it or Create Story below it.
After this, the Camera screen will open. Now, add photo or video and other filters as you would normally do.
Next, tap on Your Story at the bottom followed by Add to confirm. With this, your page story will be added and shown to all the followers.
To add multiple stories head to the page’s timeline again and tap on Add to Story this time. The rest of the process remains the same.
Similarly, you can add as many photos/videos as possible to your Facebook page story. You can see the number of views on your story while viewing it yourself at the bottom left of the screen. Like other stories, these will also last for 24 hours unless deleted earlier.
Note: You can only get this option for pages for which you are an admin.
We hope that you were able to use the Facebook page stories feature. Are you going to use it as a part of your social media promotion campaign? Share your thoughts in the comments.