Set goals for Facebook Stories.

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Set goals for Facebook Stories.

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Joe_riley · Answer 1 · 2022-07-09T21:32:22+0000

Context

First off lets just briefly establish what Facebook stories is and even more importantly why users use it. Facebook stories is a feature that allows users to share short form video clips and photos with their friends that disappear after 24 hours. There is a strip along the top of the timeline where users can see thumbnaisl for stories from their friends and tap into them to view, comment, and interact with them. Stories allow users to share much more daily casual moments in their lives with friends that aren't polished enough to be fully deserving of a permanent post.

Before we dive into the nitty gritty, let's first take a step back and make sure we understand the context surrounding the bigger picture. Facebook's mission statement is to bring the world closer together and give people the power to build community. Facebook Stories helps further this mission statement by giving users an avenue to share and view more casual less polished moments from their and their friends' lives.

Users

When we're thinking about goals for this product and what they may mean we need to keep in mind there are two different types of users for this feature:

Viewers - The users who are viewing and interacting with stories
Creators - The users creating and posting the content in the stories

Note: Users may flip flop between the two groups as they use the product

Goals

So Facebook the larger product is very mature and already has ~3B monthly active users. A product at this stage is less focused on acquiring new users and more so focused on retaining the massive amount of users they have in an effort to thwart attrition and competition from other companies like Snap.

This is where Facebook stories comes in. The goal of Facebook stories is to increase retention amongst Facebook users by increasing their engagement with Facebook. This is what we should focus our efforts on.

Measurement

In order for Stories to increase retention on the Facebook platform overall, it needs to add value for users and give them a reason to come back. The best way of measuring whether or not users are getting value out of something is how much they are engaging with it. To measure engagement we should monitor:

Creators:

Average number of stories created per user per day
Average number of unwatched stories available per session
Total # of stories created per day

Viewers:

Average number of story views per session
% of users who have viewed at least 3 stories per day
Average number of interactions per story

Once we've established that users are actually using Facebook Stories and getting value out of it, next we should assess whether or not it is actually increasing retention amongst Facebook users in general. To measure the lift in retention as a result of Facebook stories usage we could look at the following metrics:

Average number of sessions per week for users who have viewed at least 5 stories
Average number of sessions per week for users who have viewed less than 5 stories
% of users who viewed at least 5 stories last week and had 5 sessions who also came back and had at least 5 sessions this week
% of users who viewed less than 5 stories last week and had 5 sessions who also came back and had at least 5 sessions this week

Downsides

While I'm confident in the above set of metrics ability to measure whether users are getting value out of Facebookstories and whether or not Facebook stories is increasing retention on Facebook overall, no set of metrics is perfect so it's worth spending a minute discussing any potential downsides or gaps.

While intentional, all of our above metrics are very high level. They don't offer us much granularity into how Facebook stories performs amongst different segments. For example, it could perform 10x as well amongst younger users who are more familiar with short form content from IG stories and snap where as some of the older users on the platform might not engage with it as much.
Facebook is a mature and complex platform with a lot of features and functionality. Adding new features inherently competes with older features for user attention. We should examine how Facebook Stories impacts engagement with other features on the platform. I would be concerned if Facebook stories engagement went up but overall time one the platform per user went down.
We are trying to measure the lift in retention as a result of stories, but at the same time the more engaged users are more likely to use stories to begin with. It would've been nice to measure on the increase in engagement / retention caused by stories on a per user level when rolling it out.
One item we never touched upon here is monetization, which as a mature product should be at the forefront of Facebook's thinking. I do think Stories is really an engagement / retention play but there is an opportunity worth exploring here for sponsored stories.

Summary

The goal of Facebook stories is to help Facebook retain it's users through engagement with the Facebook stories feature. We've brainstormed a set of metrics above that will help us monitor the ability of Facebook stories to provide value and engage users as well the lift that has in terms of retention on the Facebook platform overall.

d_m · Answer 2 · 2022-05-17T08:23:10+0000

Starting with context:

Customers:

Facebook stories and videos and images and added by customers to share daily happenings that have in and around their place mostly to get likes and appreciation from their friends and family
Stories come with links where users can end up purchasing the product/service, reading

Companies:

another type of group of users who also who the company should want to share updates about product releases or discounts or just trying to engage with their customer
Company ads/stories come up links where user can do the following
- Buy the product after visiting the website
- Engage with the post by adding a comment
- Like the post and then browse the company’s page
- Browse the company’s website page (might decide to purchase company’s products later)

Goals:

One of the most significant revenue sources for Facebook is advertising and of course, making use of this data
So the success metric would be the increased engagement measured by time on the app. (Increase)
- Increase in Avg. time per session because of stories
- Avg. increase in revenue because of stories

Metrics:

I would break down the engagement of Facebook stories into different stages user is in their journey

	Demand-side (consumer of stories)	Supply side (creator of stories)
Adoption	Number of users who saw at least stories/ Total FB active users User creation to stories through focus groups	User conversion in funnel (Clicked on story/Total FB active users, Created a story/Total FB active users & finally posted a story/Total active FB users) Users who tried stories / Total FB active users Users who tried stories / Total active users
Engagement	Avg. a number of stories viewed by day, per week, and per month by users Avg. number of reactions given per story by users Avg. shares per story by users Total increase in time spent	Number of stories posted per user on a daily basis, on a weekly basis and monthly basis Avg. number of reactions received for each story (can look at the cohort of users based on the stage of using stories) Avg. number of views per story (can look at the cohort of users based on the stage of using stories)
Retention	% of users moving from one stage to another	% of users moving from one stage to another
Trade-off metrics	Decrease in time spent on feed Decrease in time spent messaging friends and family

I would run an AB with and without AB and try to understand how users are reacting to the product if the product is intuitive and creates customer delight.