What are the trade offs with Facebook Stories usage going up and Facebook posts going down?

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What are the trade offs with Facebook Stories usage going up and Facebook posts going down?

Asked at Meta (Facebook) over a year ago

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nehagupta · Answer 1 · 2021-08-09T17:32:31+0000

I'd use this type of structure to address this product strategy question in a pm interview.

Clarifications:

So over here we have a hypothesis that if Facebook stories usage will increase then Facebook posts (i.e. posts that appear in user's newsfeed) would go down? Is my understanding correct? Yes
Also over here we need to evaluate trade offs of this hypothesis before any development is done? Yes
Any particular objective that i shd keep in mind? choose on your own
Any specific platform for which we have this hypothesis or any specific geographical location? No across.

Description:

Facebook stories - is an ephemeral feature where users can express themselves in a creative manner via videos, special effects, images, songs. The story is visible to the user's friends for 24 hrs and then auto disappears.
1. Mission:
2. Users
  1. Creators:-
    1. Young users (agr group 18 to 24 types) who like to express themselves in interesting manners and in a more informal way and impromptu manner
    2. Middle aged users (24 to 35 types) - who like to explore creative ways to express themselves
    3. Brands - Wanting to target their audience via a more visual/attractive and more visible organic property
  2. Viewers
Where as Facebook post - is more of the age old feature where users can express themselves via various media types like text, video, images and the post is shown in other users newsfeed based on the closeness of the post creator with the other users. Also such posts are always visible on the user's own timeline. It does not self disappear.
1. Creators:-
  1. Middle aged & elderly population - from the perspective of sharing properly drafted posts with friends and to create memories which they can refer at later point of time in life.
  2. Brands - product updates, advertisements, events
2. Viewers
1. Mission:

Does this capture the main pts about the features? Yes

Goal: Engagement... ties with facebook over all goal.

Evaluation based on criteria:-

Engagement on the platform
1. With introduction of stories the overall engagement on the platform seems to increase as now even the younger millenials and gen Z are little bit more interested in spending time on facebook.
2. Apart from that, for the existing users to explore creative ways to share their experiences and feelings
3. As the content is creative and engaging as well as ephemeral it incites viewers to quickly view the content before it disappears and creates a complusive behaviour where they need to check their FB to view stories which they otherwise might miss. With posts, this compulsion was not their as feeds won't get removed from your feed unless u view them.
4. Also the use case are slightly different for post and stories so overlap is less. With stories users are creating more content since for keeping their memories they are anyhow creating posts and while small excerpts/highlights are being posted as stories and also now more impromptu content which otherwise won't be posted on facebook, is also ending up on Fb.
User experience
1. Enhanced the experience as more creative and quality content for users to create and consume.
Competition
1. Also from competitive perspective it is imp to introduce stories as competitive platform like snapchat, telegram have ephemeral status features which are quite popular among the audience and if FB does not introduce them then they will miss out on competitive trends.
Company priorities
1. Need to win back young population via engaging features like stories which is migrating to other platforms which allow them to connect with their loved ones in a more engaging, interesting way which auto disappearing features thus they don't need to worry about their data being tracked thus privacy concerns are also addressed.

Recommendation:

Stories and feed post have small overlap and thus posts might go down slightly but over all the engagement on the platform will increase and that is in alignment with the over all company goal to enable users to build communities and bring the world closer.

Nitnan · Answer 2 · 2022-07-14T04:54:01+0000

Clarifying Questions

1. For how long do we notice this kind of a drop. Is it sudden or gradual?

2. Do you have a percentage on how much drop we are experiencing?

Lets talk about the product:

Stories:

Stories is a time boxed form of the traditional post allowing the users to post images, videos and text for a set time period say 24 hours in a full screen. After which the post disappears and during the time it is on people can interact the way they interact with the posts.

Posts:

Post are the traditional facebook way of letting people expressing their throughts and happenings in the form of a image, video or text. These will be availabel in the new feed and allows for users to interact and engage with for lifetime.

Users and Value Proposition:

There are three user groups that are involved

1. Content Creators- Indivuals, Business, Influencers

2. Consumers

Hypothesis:

1. People by posting the content through the stories they can post a lot of content at one shot as each of the post is scheduled not to appear more than 20 seonds

2. A lot of poeple do not want their post to stay for life time as they are worried about some privacy reasons

3. People like creating posts as it allows users to share it with Instagram as well

4. All the comments and interactions like reactions and likes are private

5. While posts reaches a wider audience as it is in the newsfeed whereas the stories are picked based on the interest

Metrics: I would want to track few metrics to see if there can be a tradeoff is justifiable

Content creators:

1. Number of posts created per week per user before rolling out stories

2. Number of posts created per week per user after rolling out stories

3. Number of Stories created per week per user

If point 3 is more than point 1 it is unserstood that peopla re more interested in posting stories than the posts

Content Consumers

1. Average likes/reactions/comments/share per post before rolling out stories per week

2. Average likes/reactions/Messages sent/share per story per week

If point 2 is more than point 1 and the difference should not be more than 50% (as this would lead to cannibalizing the post and newsfeed becomes less interactive) then it is understood that people are now interested wit the stories more than posts

Facebook level

1. Average time spent by a user within facebook - Slight Decrease as the time taken by user to read through feed is higher than viewing targeted stories

2. Total number of sessions per day - Decreases as there will not be any back and forth as we miss the comments that involves more engagement

3. Total number of ads watched/CTR - Increased as people move though the stories they watch a story as an ad without needing to skip

4. DAU/WAU - Increased as there are more sties available to read

Tradeoff

1. Average time spent by a user within facebook - Decrease as the time taken by user to read through feed is higher than viewing targeted stories

2. 2. Total number of sessions per day - Decreases as there will not be any back and forth as we miss the comments that involves more engagement

Ship/No Ship Decision

Considering the above tradeoff still the metrics mentioned consumer level and producer level increases pertaining to the stories then it could be shipped for which an A/B testing is required with control goups segregated

Nitnan · Answer 3 · 2022-07-14T04:53:49+0000

Clarifying Questions

1. For how long do we notice this kind of a drop. Is it sudden or gradual?

2. Do you have a percentage on how much drop we are experiencing?

Lets talk about the product:

Stories:

Stories is a time boxed form of the traditional post allowing the users to post images, videos and text for a set time period say 24 hours. After which the post disappears and during the time it is on people can interact the way they interact with the posts.

Posts:

Post are the traditional facebook way of letting people expressing their throughts and happenings in the form of a image, video or text. These will be availabel in the new feed and allows for users to interact and engage with for lifetime.

Users and Value Proposition:

There are three user groups that are involved

1. Content Creators- Indivuals, Business, Influencers

2. Consumers

Hypothesis:

1. People by posting the content through the stories they can post a lot of content at one shot as each of the post is scheduled not to appear more than 20 seonds

2. A lot of poeple do not want their post to stay for life time as they are worried about some privacy reasons

3. People like creating posts as it allows users to share it with Instagram as well

4. All the comments and interactions like reactions and likes are private

5. While posts reaches a wider audience as it is in the newsfeed whereas the stories are picked based on the interest

Metrics: I would want to track few metrics to see if there can be a tradeoff is justifiable

Content creators:

1. Number of posts created per week per user before rolling out stories

2. Number of posts created per week per user after rolling out stories

3. Number of Stories created per week per user

If point 3 is more than point 1 it is unserstood that peopla re more interested in posting stories than the posts

Content Consumers

1. Average likes/reactions/comments/share per post before rolling out stories per week

2. Average likes/reactions/Messages sent/share per story per week

If point 2 is more than point 1 and the difference should not be more than 50% (as this would lead to cannibalizing the post and newsfeed becomes less interactive) then it is understood that people are now interested wit the stories more than posts

Facebook level

1. Average time spent by a user within facebook - Slight Decrease as the time taken by user to read through feed is higher than viewing targeted stories

2. Total number of sessions per day - Decreases as there will not be any back and forth as we miss the comments that involves more engagement

3. Total number of ads watched/CTR - Increased as people move though the stories they watch a story as an ad without needing to skip

4. DAU/WAU - Increased as there are more sties available to read

Tradeoff

1. Average time spent by a user within facebook - Decrease as the time taken by user to read through feed is higher than viewing targeted stories

2. 2. Total number of sessions per day - Decreases as there will not be any back and forth as we miss the comments that involves more engagement

Ship/No Ship Decision

Considering the above tradeoff still the metrics mentioned consumer level and producer level increases pertaining to the stories then it could be shipped for which an A/B testing is required with control goups segregated

Anonymous duck · Answer 4 · 2021-12-30T22:13:09+0000

Clarifying questions:

1. What do you mean by usage here? Is it an increase in user acquisition? Or user engagement? Let's assume here that it is the engagement of the existing users that has gone up.

2. Does this mean that the creation/ view or both of posts/stories has gone up? Let's assume both

2. To clarify the feature: Does FB show ads between the FB stories, just like Instagram does? If yes, is the frequency the same as the one it follows when a user scrolls through his feed?

What are these features?

Facebook Posts: The older feature of FB where users could post a variety of content like status updates, life changes, photos, texts, etc. The content stays on FB forever and people can like, comment and share. Others can see what comments have been made on the post.

Facebook Stories: Limited content (photos and text only) but highly engaging. Users can quickly post updates, without cluttering their and others' feeds. Content stays for 24 hours only. The public cannot see users' responses to the stories.

Pros	Cons
Demonstrates higher user engagement. Users want to create and view content faster.	FB may be losing out on a user base that does not visit FB every 24 hours. They cannot keep up with quick updates (Seems like a huge user base for FB)
The more action users perform, the faster to collect user information	Drives down community interaction. (lack of public posts, likes, etc)
If the rate of showing ads between posts and stories remains the same, then users see more ads here	Users miss out on life, status, and other updates of their friends. This makes FB's model similar to others like Instagram and it is more prone to competition now.

In order to make a calculated decision between the 2 features, it would be important to reflect back on FB's primary goal - making revenue through ads. We should look at the avg revenue coming in per user through stories and through posts and whether that remains unchanged.

Edit: I read 2 amazing points in NehaGupta's answer that I should have included under pros:

- Helps FB increase compulsive behavior to constantly check your phone

- Helps them stay at par with the competition.

og_datascientist · Answer 5 · 2021-08-08T15:26:42+0000

Clarifying question -
- When we say fb stories are going up and posts going down does it mean that the number of fb stories posted is going up vs posts posted going down?
- Assuming we have not AB tested the feature and we want to see how is it trending since launch.
Talk about Fb mission - Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.
- the reason for it - at the end of the day the final result should be inline with facebook mission
There are two sides to this - content creator vs consumer
I want to start by confirming the hypothesis - ie is stories posted going up vs posts posted. Understand this by looking at the following
- Stories posted per active user per day and posts posted per active user
- Number of story only posters vs number of post only posters vs number of story + post posters
- For number of story + post posters - share of story posts
- Another angle to look at is distribution of users by % stories posted. This will probably be valuable for heavy content posters.
- Look at total content created per poster - is this going up at the end of the day?
- Understand if total content posted is going up?
Consumer side - this is for understanding tradeoff i.e. cannibalization vs incremental?
- Build following cohorts within consumers who have heavy content to watch across both stories and posts
  - Highly, medium and low engaged users across both pre and post - This segmentation can be done using time spent on facebook. Look at following metrics for each cohort
    - Time spent viewing stories vs time spent viewing posts
    - Interaction with stories vs posts. Split this by comment, like and share. And total.
    - Normalize engagement for story vs post content posted on the consumer page. Ie if 1% of my total posts are stories then my engagement with stories is going to 1%
    - % consumed content - across stories and posts.
  - New users who installs facebook after stories feature was launched.
    - % engagement on stories
    - Total time spent on the platform per user
    - Compare this with installs when there was no stories feature. Make sure to normalize for content posted on their platform.
There will be tradeoffs but if we see total engagement increase either within total time spent or quality of engagement ie interacting with comment, like and share then the story feature tradeoff is positive.

Please give feedback. @bijan - what are your thoughts.