Facebook Stories is an interesting feature that allows you to share your photos, videos, and much more with your friends. An amusing thing about this cool feature is that you can see one’s stories only for a day. In simple words, the shared media would disappear after 24 hours. Remember what Snapchat came up with back then in 2013 and Instagram in 2016? It’s very similar to that.
What exactly are Facebook Stories?
These are very short user-generated collections of media like photos, videos, and animations. What makes this feature super-interesting and exciting to use is Facebook’s in-app camera. Facebook’s in-app camera allows its users to play around some fun filters and lenses, like the ones on Instagram and Snapchat. It also lets you add visual geolocation tags to the photos and videos you share. Simply swipe right on your Facebook application, and there you get the access to this camera.
Facebook stories sound like a short, crisp tale that you got to tell your folks. Just in an exciting fashion. With time, Facebook Stories have become an amazing way to engage with your friends and following. They just leveled up the game of communication on social media, making it more fascinating.
Also read – Guide To Marketing Through Facebook
How do Facebook Stories work?
This feature isn’t any different from Instagram Stories. You can share any content like a photo or video that you wish to through Facebook Stories. These stories will appear at the top of your friends’ and followers’ Facebook feed. It appears in a row at the top of your messenger box in a circle around it.
To watch a friend’s story, all you need to do is tap the circle of the friend whose stories you wish to see. Not just this, you can also reply to that friend with a direct message while viewing the story.
Steps to add content through Facebook Stories
Sharing content with the help of Facebook Stories doesn’t require any rocket science. This feature is pretty to use. Let’s go through the simple baby steps regarding how to add content to Facebook Stories.
Step 1: Grab the Camera
You will come across a camera icon on your Facebook mobile application. This will let you click photos and videos. Tap on the icon to get access to the camera, and there you go! You are set to create your Facebook Story.
Step 2: Create what you wish to
Now you have access to the Facebook in-app camera, and all you need to do now is click and share! Once you open the camera, you can click a photo or a video with it. To click a photo, tap anywhere on the screen, and you get your quick real-time snap. For capturing the video, hold on to the icon with a long press on the screen.
Didn’t get the desired click in the first attempt? No worries! You can always discard the clicked photo or video and click a new one. Moreover, you can choose a picture that you had clicked already to share it via story. Any old picture from your camera roll can be used if you don’t wish to click a new one.
This feature gets interesting when additional things like lenses, stickers, and filters come into play. They embroider and decorate your content with their amazing creative touch and make your clicked content more attractive. You can add effects, animations, stickers, and emojis, and thus, you can dive into the sea of these amazing little additional features to enhance and showcase your creativity in front of your peers.
Step 3: Share it through a story
Now that you have your perfect picture clicked, the final step is to share it with your friends. Click on the ‘arrow’ icon on the screen. You will be asked with whom do you wish to share the photo or video.
You can selectively choose the friends you want to share the clicked content via a direct message. Click on the option called “Your Story” and tap on the send button present at the bottom right of your screen.
Voila! Your story is shared with all of your friends and the following.
Facebook stories for page owners
If you are an admin or an editor of any brand’s Facebook page, then Facebook Stories has got something on its plate for you as well. The feature, when launched, was only accessible for the general users and not the pages. In October 2017, Facebook made the feature available to everyone, including the page owners. This helped the online business pages and brands to keep up with the business game with the help of exciting ways of content sharing. Because sharing is caring, right?
With the aid of Facebook Stories, all the pages that had established their presence on Facebook flourished with an excellent reach among their target audience. As the brands got more ways to share their content with their audience, their following overall thrived.
Now that we’re talking about sharing stories, let us go through how a page owner can make optimum use of the stories feature. The story sharing process for pages is quite similar to that for general users.
This is how you add stories through your Facebook page.
Step 1: When you are on your feed, tap the three horizontal lines button at the bottom right. This will bring up your pages and groups. Tap on your page.
Step 2: Now, the steps are similar to that of before. Access your in-app camera and click the picture you want to share via stories. You may also select a previously clicked picture from the camera roll.
Step 3: Garner it with filters and other additional features and share it with your audience by clicking on ”Your Story.”
If you have your Instagram account linked with your Facebook account, you can directly share your Instagram stories on Facebook in one go. Your Instagram stories get automatically posted on Facebook as well in one touch, and you don’t have to always post it manually on Facebook separately.
Characteristics of Facebook stories
On your feed, your friends’ stories appear with a blue circle around their profile images. To view someone’s story, you just have to tap on the circle.
While watching multiple posted stories, you can always navigate forwards and backward to watch the next or previous story of the person, respectively. Tap on the left side of the screen to watch his previous story and tap on the right side of the screen to view the next story.
Facebook stories don’t come with likes or comments, but views. You can always check who viewed your story.
You can also save your stories to your device by changing the setting to “Save.” Not just this, but you can also view the history of your previous stories in the “Your Archive” section on the top of your feed.
You can directly message your friend through his story. Stories come with a “direct message” button at its bottom, which allows the viewer to interact with the person with a direct message as a reply to the story.
Advantages of Facebook Stories
A lot of people have started taking advantage of Facebook Stories to stay in the digital race. Many businesses and brands have been harnessing the power of Facebook stories since its launch, and are still figuring out new ways to get better at it.
Let us have a look at its advantages and know why stories are the talk of the digital market.
Uniqueness
It would be no wrong to say that the uniqueness of Facebook stories has excited the users of the platform more than before. With the help of stories, a brand can exquisitely tailor its content to its audience.
Time-Sensitive Content
The fact that Facebook stories are short-lived, make them more fascinating and compelling. As a business brand, you can share essential updates and necessary information for a limited time. As the stories are time-sensitive content, it helps the audience to stay updated with what they want.
Brand focused
Facebook Stories lets you form your experiential marketing strategy. You can extend the reach among your audience by focusing on building your brand image.
They have become super popular in recent years, and it would be stupid to ask how. They combine two essential modes of communication; video and storytelling. A decade ago, SMS used to be the primary mode of digital communication, and today visual content sharing is the leading and trending method. Texts have become a support to the dominant visual side of the communication.
It has become as easy as ever to share content with the help of stories. Even if you don’t have a business page on Facebook, you still have access to exciting features that have redefined content sharing. You can start harnessing the power of Facebook stories to stay alive and competent in the game.
