So Facebook’s got one, Messenger’s got one, Instagram’s got one and Whatsapp’s got one… did I forget anyone?
I just can’t remember who else has social media stories at the moment, but I’m sure it will come to me sooner or later while writing this post.
Social media stories are taking over your feed. And that’s a [good] thing.
Mainly because the scrolling feed that we all know and ~love is not really ideal for seeing what your friends are up to.
A news feed will usually give you a list of posts by people you follow, in a reverse-chronological order (from the newest to the oldest) which is, well, weird and unnatural.
Social media stories actually let you see a chronological ordered (oldest to newest) series of posts by your friends. This will let you see what they’ve been up to during the day, from the morning to the evening, and it’ll be easier to understand, thanks to it’s chronological order.
And that’s only the first part!
A feed will be filled with content from pages and friends, according to an algorithm, choosing for you what you should and shouldn’t find interesting.
Something a friend of yours posted that had a lot of reactions could be shown to you because of that, but it could very well be shown to you again hours after it was posted, just in case you might be interested in the updates.
This totally Fs up your feed and makes it completely non-chronological, since you might see one post from an hour ago, the next one from 10 minutes ago, and the third one from yesterday.
Is that something you find natural in a conversation? Didn’t think so.
Social media stories allow you to simply choose which one of your friends’ daily story you’re interested in seeing by touching their face… ehrm, I mean clicking on their profile picture in the stories section.
Social media stories also solves a huge content problem
One of the toughest issues social media platforms are facing at the moment is User Generated Content, or UGC. Since people go on social media for a change of pace, they usually prefer to scroll the feed for all the fine curated content, that pages that curate content, curate.
Not all social media platforms are good at getting people to create their own content. Facebook has even tested opening the app with your phone camera on, but that didn’t seem to have impressed the testers.
What they did manage to pass as a feature was the camera overlay effects and sending the result directly to friends… I swear this reminds me of something, but I just can’t put my finger on it.
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