Tag Archive for: Facebook Stories

Facebook Reveals New Content Scheduling and Management Features For Business Suite

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Facebook is launching a wave of new tools and features for businesses including the ability to schedule stories, manage photo albums, and better manage post drafts.

While some of the new Facebook Business Suite features revealed in a recent blog post are available to businesses everywhere now, the company also gave a peek into a few updates coming soon.

Schedule Your Stories on Facebook and Instagram

Facebook Business Suite already let brands schedule and manage traditional posts and content. Now, it is extending that functionality to Stories. 

Using Business Suite, you can start creating, publishing, and scheduling stories for both Facebook and Instagram from mobile and desktop devices. 

On desktop, simply click “Create Story” while using Business Suite. On the mobile app, you will find the feature by tapping the “Posts & Stories” tab.

Once you have opened the scheduling tool, follow these steps:

  • Select which platform (Facebook, Instagram, or both) you want to publish to.
  • Click Upload Media and select your photo or video.
  • Add text and stickers or crop your story.
  • Preview the content.
  • Click “Publish Story” to immediately share your story or click the blue arrow to expand the menu and select “Schedule Story” to decide when your story should go live. 

Edit Scheduled Posts

Along with scheduling your posts and stories, Business Suite now allows you to edit your scheduled content before it goes live. 

To make revisions or edits, go to the “Scheduled Posts” section of the “Posts & Stories” tab and simply select “Edit Post” on the specific content you want to change. 

Coming Soon: Create and Manage Albums

Soon, Business Suite will let brands create and manage photo albums within the “Posts & Stories” tab.

As the announcement says:

“Creating Albums is a useful and engaging way to showcase your business’ personality and share new products or services.”

Coming Soon: Save and Manage Content Drafts

The company teased that you will soon be able to create and edit drafts for drafts and stories and return to them later. However, it is unclear when this will roll out to the public.

With Facebook Analytics being shut down, Business Suite is becoming an essential tool for brands looking to manage their Facebook and Instagram presence in one place. Thankfully, it look like Facebook is similarly prioritizing making the platform as fully featured and versatile as possible before Analytics is gone for good.

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Facebook begins allowing all businesses to run ads in Stories

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Facebook is finally allowing all advertisers to run ads during users’ Stories.

The social network has been allowing a limited number of brands across three countries to create ads that appear during Stories published on the site since May, but this is the first time the company has expanded the option to smaller businesses.

Notably, during this time period, the number of people watching Facebook Stories each day has more than doubled from 150 million to over 300 million viewers.

In addition to making the ads available to a wider range of brands, the company has also rolled out a number of new tools and features to better target the ads and improve performance.

As part of these features, Facebook Stories now allow brands to optimize for all objectives available for Instagram Stories ads, including:

  • Reach
  • Brand awareness
  • Video views
  • App installs
  • Conversion
  • Traffic
  • Lead generation

Facebook has also brought all of its targeting and reporting tools for ads to Story ads, allowing brands to better track their performance.

As part of the official announcement of Story ads, Facebook emphasized how popular their Story feature has become and the impact of ads viewed during Stories:

“Advertising in stories has proven to drive valuable business outcomes. In the Ipsos survey, 62% of people said they became more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in a story. And brands testing Facebook Stories ads are already seeing results. iHeartRadio, Kettle Chips and KFC are among the advertisers who have seen brand lift from their Facebook Stories ad campaigns.”

The company also noted some other interesting statistics about Stories, such as:

  • More than half of people surveyed said they’re making more online purchases as a result of seeing stories.
  • 38% of people said that after seeing a product or service in a story they talked to someone about it.
  • 34% said they went to a store to look for a product after seeing it in a story.
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Ads come to Facebook Stories

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Facebook’s Stories are officially being monetized, as the social network announces new ads within their latest big feature.

The rising popularity of Facebook’s stories has been a slow growth. It has taken approximately 14 months since the launch of the feature to reach 150 million daily views.

To put that in context, Instagram’s Stories reached the same milestone within five months. Since then, Instagram Stories have continued growing to reach more than 300 million daily users.

Of course, now that Facebook has amassed a sizable audience for the feature, Search Engine Journal reports the platform is adding ads to Stories.

Facebook began testing ads in Stories earlier this month in North America and Brazil earlier this month. The ads consist of 5-to-15 second video clips, which can be skipped by simply taping through to the next story.

Compared to most of Facebook’s offerings, these new ads are relatively bare-bones. There is no click-through, no call-to-action, or any of the other ad features you are used to. However, Facebook plans to add those soon.

Along with the launch of Story ads, Facebook is working on bringing more detailed analytics about the performance of Stories to businesses, to help monitor your investment.

If you already have Story ads running on Instagram, you can automatically migrate them to Facebook. Or, you can let Facebook automatically format your news feed ads for the Story feature, including a color-matched border and text at the bottom.

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Facebook tries to revitalize Stories by letting all pages share their own

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In an attempt to breathe some life into their version of ‘Stories’, Facebook is expanding the feature to all pages – rather than just individual users.

This means brands can now start sharing Stories too all their friends and followers, though it’s unclear whether businesses will take Facebook up on the offer.

Since launching the Snapchat-like feature on Facebook earlier this year, Stories have largely been ignored by most users. Compared to Instagram or Snapchat, Facebook has struggled to find the right place or utility for their own version of the feature and many have forgotten the feature exists at all.

Rather than admitting their failure, the massive social platform is doubling down in hopes that they can encourage more users to share their own stories by letting brands take the lead. Presumably, the hope is that users will follow more influential pages’ leads and boost the number of Stories being shared.

According to Facebook, the expansion has actually been in high-demand recently. Product manager Amy Sun says users have been clamoring for more ways to share and engage in the feature.

”We’ve been listening to our community and working to make it fast, fun and easy for people and Pages to create Stories on Facebook. Over the coming month, Pages will be able to create Stories to share with the people who follow them.”

It is entirely possible that this move will allow Facebook Stories to finally find their audience and take off as a legitimate way to engage with your friends and followers. However, it feels likely that Stories are just not a natural fit for Facebook and may never see similar levels of popularity as on Snapchat, where the idea originated.

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Facebook Announces ‘Your Business Story’ and Advertising Milestone

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YourBusinessStory

Facebook announced a new video offering for small businesses called Your Business Story, which would allow Pages to easily create and share montage-videos incorporating still images and music. At the same time, the company let slip that it now has over three million advertisers.

Your Business Story is a simple tool similar to the previously announced SlideShow offering. The company didn’t say anything about ads being included in the platform, but the note about their recent advertising milestone suggests the new offering will eventually work its way into Facebook Ads.

In the announcement, Facebook said:

To celebrate the businesses that use Facebook to grow, we created Your Business Story — a tool that makes it easy to create a video that shows what your business brings to the world. Because we believe the best way to tell the story of three million businesses is to empower each one to share their own.

Three million advertisers is a significant milestone for the social media platform. In September, the company announced it had reached 2.5 million. Before that, it claimed two million advertisers in February 2015. That means Facebook has been bringing in about half a million advertisers every six months for about the past year.

The announcement also said the majority of the businesses that use Facebook’s ad services are small businesses, also saying “50 million small businesses now use Pages on Facebok.”

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