Facebook has introduced a new feature to bolster the Stories product on its flagship social network.
Now, users can integrate their events into Stories, using it to link other users to the events and mark themselves as “interested” or “going.”
When visiting or creating an event page, users will now have the option to “share to [their] Story.” In the story, they can create a tappable sticker that shows more details. The Story will also enable people who are going to start a group chat with other attendees.
Stories have been a growing medium across social networks such as Snapchat and Instagram. Although Facebook’s subsidiary Instagram’s stories have taken off both in terms of usage (an estimated 500 million users per day view Instagram Stories) and advertising (CEO Mark Zuckerberg says more than two million advertisers use them, and global firm Klear found that 34% of sponsored Instagram content are now Stories), Facebook has been far quieter about its own Stories product.
It has only publicly divulged figures on Stories usage once – in May of last year, it reported that 150 million people use Stories, putting it significantly below Snapchat Stories users, at less than half of Instagram Stories users and a fraction of WhatsApp Status users. Still, that hasn’t stopped the company from making bullish bets on Stories; at the 2018 F8 conference, Zuckerberg said it looks like Stories will become a bigger medium than Facebook’s signature News Feed ever was. It’s on a mission to add more tools and features to Stories; besides the event stickers, other features include bigger previews and a default connection to Facebook’s in-app camera.
Facebook first monetized the Stories feature in September.