Facebook stories may be around for a while, after all.
The feature, launched by Facebook in Ireland in 2017, was designed to compete with Instagram or Snapchat. It essentially allowed users to add photos and videos to a story for their friends to tap through. Like with Instagram or Snapchat, there are different effects you could add, like masks, frames and various filters. Stories would not appear in your regular newsfeed at all, and they would disappear entirely after 24 hours.
Until now.
Facebook is now rolling out an Archives feature, which will allow you to reuse or repost older stories. They announced the move in May and have been rolling it out to more and more customers ever since.
Stories posts will now be stored in your archive, which is not visible to other users. You can switch it off if you'd rather keep your content fresh, but the option to keep your Stories content for longer than the initial 24 hour period will allow you to re-use photos or other content, or re-post them to other platforms, including Instagram Stories.
For businesses, the implication is obvious. Not many used the feature, even though Facebook claimed otherwise, because they involved a lot of work for a relatively small payoff—they were simply gone too quickly.
Now, however, it might be wise to invest more time and effort into Stories content. Through the archive, you can more easily re-use your best-performing Stories posts - or just keep them for reference so you can better track what works and what doesn't.
It’s easy to get started: simply scroll to the bottom of your post window and click the proper box.
If you don’t see the option yet, you will soon. Will you use the new feature? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments!