Facebook’s slow-growing Snapchat clone Stories could be getting a boost — the social media platform recently confirmed that Stories would be rolling out for Pages within the next month.
According to TechCrunch, Facebook says that Pages will be able to post its own Stories soon, as the company is working to bring the feature to business profiles. The feature will allow businesses to post their own string of video clips that disappear after 24 hours, with the Story popping up in the same location as current Facebook Stories, displayed for users who follow the page.
While Snapchat originated the feature, Instagram boasts the highest number of Stories users, including public figures and brands using the feature. A year after launching the feature, Instagram said that half of all businesses on Instagram were using Stories on at least a monthly basis. That trend likely influenced Facebook’s decision to open up the feature to brands using public Pages as well.
“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,” Amy Sun, Facebook product manager, told TechCrunch. “Over the coming month, Pages will be able to create Stories to share with the people who follow them.”
Giving Pages access to the Facebook Stories feature could help the sharing option to expand to more users, but it could also fill the feature with content that too closely resembles ads, depending on the type of short videos businesses share.
Facebook has been working to expand the Stories feature with several updates since the tool first launched earlier this year. A public privacy setting has already brought the feature to public profiles, bringing the tool beyond just friends, something that Pages integration should help expand. The company also migrated the feature to desktop viewers over the summer.
Last week, the company launched cross-compatibility to post Instagram Stories to Facebook, a feature which should help expand the number of Stories posted to Facebook. While Facebook hasn’t shared any hard numbers, the feature hasn’t been as popular as Instagram’s, where the stream of videos skyrocketed to 100 million users in the first two months. Instagram Stories now has over 250 million users.
