Why Stories is ushering a new era of social media

Photo credit: Dzmitry Kliapitski

Back in 2006, Facebook unveiled a new feature so radical and controversial that it provoked mass outrage and widespread calls for a boycott. They called it the News Feed.

Despite the initial backlash, it caught on. As the network raced past 1 billion users, then 2 billion, the News Feed was there, every step of the way.

But that may all be about to change: the news feed is old news. There’s a new format on the block, and it’s growing 15 times faster than old-fashioned feeds.

I’m talking about Stories—the vertical, ephemeral slideshows typically comprised of photos, videos, and graphics made by users over the course of a day.

Debuted by Snapchat in 2013, Stories has since gone on to quietly eat the social media universe. Combined, there are more than 1 billion social accounts hooked on the format.

The inevitable rise of Stories

It’s easy to understand Stories’ appeal. For starters, the News Feed concept is largely a holdover from Facebook’s origins in the desktop era. Users tethered to their computers were limited to sharing short text bursts—blurbs about breakfast, interesting links, etc. So, a scrolling feed of updates made sense.

But the widespread adoption of smartphones with ever more powerful cameras changed the kind of content that could be captured and shared. Stories are much better suited to users’ mobile-first lifestyles, offering a 360-degree view of an experience that an ordinary status update just can’t match.

The popularity of Stories also reflects an increasing demand for privacy—or, at least, intimacy—among users. In contrast to traditional updates, Stories are generally designed to disappear forever after 24 hours, leaving little personal data to be mined afterward (barring a screenshot).

Meanwhile, Stories aren’t necessarily meant to be “shared” or “liked” in the same way as a traditional post, offering a reprieve from the vanity metrics that rule other social formats. For many users, this translates to a medium that’s less serious, more spontaneous, and often far more fun than traditional posting.

Zooming out, Stories may be serving an even more critical role for social media: restoring user confidence and reactivating interest. In the wake of years of controversy and aggressive data collection, trust in social media has plunged to record lows, with some research indicating that Facebook use actually declined this year.

As the name suggests, Stories manage to put the human story—what made social media so compelling to begin with—front and center once more. Users flock to a format where creativity, spontaneity, and real drama finally trump clickbait and mass-produced recipe videos.

Challenges for companies 

For companies who rely on social media to reach their customers, this presents both brand new opportunities and challenges.

According to TechCrunch editor Josh Constine, “Advertisers must rethink their message not as a headline, body text, and link, but as a background, overlays, and a feeling that lingers even if viewers don’t click through.” In other words, firing off a tweet, sharing a link to the latest company blog post, or blasting out a static ad no longer cuts it in the Stories era.