What would you do if Facebook Stories engagement increased but Newsfeed engagement decreased?

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What would you do if Facebook Stories engagement increased but Newsfeed engagement decreased?

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Amit J · Answer 1 · 2022-02-03T05:05:26+0000

What would you do if Facebook Stories engagement increased but Newsfeed engagement decreased?

In Order to answer above, I will ask couple of clarifying questions:

1) Does this change happened last week or last month? The comparison is WoW or MoM or QoQ or YoY? - Lets assume last quarter.

2) Was their any other indicator or metrics that also got changed with the above? - None

3) Is it WW phenomena, or Specific region or country or state/City? - Lets assume its WW.

4) is it observed on Desktop/Laptop or Mobile app? Any specific OS? - Assume its both

5) I would also like to clarify understanding of definition of newsfeed - These are vertical posts which a user scroll down and like, comments etc while which are shown to user based on their behavior, while facebook stories are similar to instagram stories placed horizontal and are short stories like tik tok which elapsed after like 24 hours.

6) is there any drop in active users? - assume its same

7) is overall time spend by users on facebook went down - assume its the same.

8) is there any drop in revenue? - yes , there has been modest impact on revenue.

9) is it because ads are not yet effectively placed on facebook stories yet vs vertical newsfeed - yes

Summarizing and clarifying the scope of problem - facebook stories engagement increased but newsfeed engagement decreased last quarter in WW on all different platforms while Revenue has been impacted due to non-placement of ads on Facebook stories.

lets look at Facebook mission and how Facebook earns revenue?

Facebook mission is " to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."

Facebook earns most of the revenue through ads which is based on "Pay per play" model by driving engagement on facebook app.

While Facebook is bringing community together by driving (increasing) engagement on stories, in that case facebook should follow the signal of change in user behavior and work with product team on monetizing the ads on Facebook stories and perform A/B testing after the launch to continue to learn more about users and refine the product.

Michael Le · Answer 2 · 2022-01-26T17:13:25+0000

My understanding of Facebook stories: FB stories is similar to Instagram stories and was inspired by the success of this feature. It enables users to post short stories that their friends or followers can then view. The overall goal and primkary revenue source for Facebook as an app are ad placements and collection of user data. That is the goal that I will focus my follow-up actions on.

Defining Ecosystem:
Candidate: Has this happened more so on mobile, website or both?

Interviewer: It's only been happening on mobile. On web, the metrics are very similar.

Defining Engagement:

Candidate: Great, metrics, let's get into that. There are two forms of engagement here:

Creator engagement and viewer engagement. Are we referring to one or the other?

Inteviewer: Let's stick with viewer engagement

Candidate: Great, thanks. For the metric of measuring engagement itself, I'm going to assume that for stories, we mean a user is viewing or clicking on a story and watching the story at least for 20% of available playback coupled with liking or commenting, while Newsfeed engagement means post scroll into view, likes and comments.

Interviewer: Works for me...by the way what do you mean by post scroll

Candidate: Since FB is a data driven company, my assumption is that there is a way to measure when a post is being viewed by a user on their newsfeed, as in when it's on screen and being looked at after scrolling down newsfeed.

Interviewer: Ah, okay, so when it's displayed and to the user after scrolling through newsfeed.

Candiate: Yes

Defining Time Period:

Candidate: Okay, up next is the timeframe in which this happened. Was this gradual, or did it happen more recently as a spike in the last rolling x days or months that this is being measured?

Interviewer: This has happened gradually over the last few months

Candidate: Okay great, and could you let me know when stories first launched?

Interviewer: About 5 months ago

Candidate: Perfect, so from what I've gathered so far, we are focusing on mobile impact of engagement between stories and newsfeed, of which can be defined by view, likes, and comments with each own respective way to measure viewing. Lastly, the timeframe so far has been over the last few months, which I assume means 3 months, and stories was implemented 5 months ago.

Defining Market Forces: We know that tik tok has taken the world by storm, and the way that tik tok and instagram reels works is by providing a quick and easy to digest form of entertainment. Stories falls into this bucket of shortened video and entertainment and could be hooking onto facebook users more than we had intended, causing users to go directly into viewing stories versus scrolling further down on their newsfeed.

Candidate: Has there been a drop in registration growth rates or DAU/MAU?
Interviewer: There has not

Candidate: Do we have ad placement in Stories?
Interviewer: We are trialing it, but have not rolled it out en masse.

Summarize and Inject Idea/Innovation:

To summarise there has been no overall impact on user growth and retention for facebook, but due to the change form newsfeed engagement to stories engagement and the early rollout of ads in stories, facebook's top line is impacted. Based on user preference and engagement on stories, if we are seeing users 'churn' over to stories from newsfeed, then we would want to follow that signal and optimize how we can continue the business of building communities via stories.

Candidate: Great, so although Facebook is continuing to gain users and keep current users, the engagement has shifted from newsfeed centric to stories centric. An opportunity that presents itself in this scenario is to roll out placement of ads every so often between stories and turn on this stream of revenue similar to how Instagram stories operates today. At the same time, to further improve the Facebook ecosystem and content availability, it might make sense to integrate facebook stories and instagram stories in that users who only post facebook stories can also auto post to instagram, while users on instagram can also post to facebook and both are viewable on both platforms. When a user is on instagram, they may see a story from a facebook user, and when someone is on facebook, they may see an instagram user post potentially on an 'explore' page.

rahul borkar · Answer 3 · 2022-01-17T23:12:34+0000

My thoughts on answering this typical Facebook execution question...

Clarifying Questions (CQ):

My understanding of Facebook stories: FB users can share photos, add captions which disappear on the audience's feed after some time. Users have to scroll horizontally for more stories shared by their friends or groups of their interest.

My understanding of Facebook Engagement: FB users can scroll on their devices vertically to get content in the form of statuses, news and videos shared by the groups they have added or their friends

CQ: Is that the correct understanding? - Yes

CQ: What is the time period over which we have seen the average time spent on stories/newsfeed dropping? - Interviewer: This trend is observed over the last 2 quarters and is a consistent trend month on month

CQ: Is this trend observed across any specific device? - A: It is observed across all devices.

CQ: Have we checked if the data is right? - Interviewer: Yes the data is correct

CQ: Is this trend observed across any specific geography or across geographies? - Interviewer: The trend is observed across geographies

I would first like to explain on what engagement in terms of metrics actually means, potentially choose a few key ones to track for this change, assess the impact of the change on the overall health of the business and make my recommendations basis that. Does that sound like a good plan. Interviewer: Sounds good

I would like to divide engagement in 2 categories:

Core Functionality Usage Metrics of Stories and Engagement:

a) Average stories/newsfeed content viewed per user, b) Average time spent on stories/newsfeed per user c) Average number of shared stories/newsfeed content per user

Core User Satisfaction Metrics:

a) Average Likes on Stories/Newsfeed content per user

b) Average Comments on Stories/Newsfeed content per user

For the sake of this discussion I will consider Average time spent on stories/newsfeed per user since both products are complementary and have the potential to cannibalize each other. Is that ok? - Interviewer: Yes

Next I would like to understand the impact of this change on other key business metrics of facebook. Does t

CQ: Has the overall average time spent on facebook per user dropped during the same time? Interviewer: It has improved at an overall level

So adjusting for the drop in facebook stories the average time spent on facebook has increased.

CQ: Has this change led to any (potential) downside for us in terms of:

a) Overall Understanding of the users - their interests, hobbies, personalities - No we have more or less the same understanding

b) What's happening with monthly retention of users of stories/newsfeed/overall facebook users? - No change in the trends

c) Have we lost marketshare to other social media websites because of this increase? Interviewer: Overall marketshare has remained constant.

d) What's the feedback that we are getting from the PR team? Interviewer: Interviewer: There is overall positivity in the market because of this change and nothing significant to worry about than the usual

e) Overall Revenue generated through advertising: Interviewer: Yes, the revenues have dropped during this time.

CQ: Is that because there are no ad placements in stories while there are ad placements in newsfeed? - Interviewer: yes as the newsfeed have historical ad placements which generate majority of facebook revenue while the stories are new and the advertising team is currently working on introducing ad placements for stories.

To summarise there has been no overall impact on user level engagement metrics but revenue has been impacted because the stories are not yet supporting ad placements which impacts monetization of facebook. This is a matter of concern and the launch of ad placements for stories should be fast tracked. Post launch of the ad placement of stories an A/B test should be run to track the overall impact on revenues because of launch of these ad placements. The key success criteria of this experiment is to check the overall increase in revenue of facebook because of the introduction of ad placement in stories.

Joe_riley · Answer 4 · 2022-07-29T18:43:53+0000

Context

Great, let's just start off by recapping what each feature is. Facebook stories allows users to post short video clips that expire after 24 hours which their friends can view at the top of their Newsfeed. The Newsfeed itself is a continuous list of content from around your network and Facebook algorithmically determined to be the most interesting to you.

Clarification

I'd like to ask a few investigative questions to drill down and hopefully gain a better understanding of what exactly is happening:

When we say engagement has decreased or increased, how exactly are we measuring engagement? I would want a clear definitions of the metrics involved here. If views went down but interactions (Likes, Comments, etc) went up then we can't make a blanket statement that engagement went down when really surface level engagement went down but deep engagement went up.
During what time range did we observe this change? I'm going to make the assumption that it is statistically significant and not just the result of natural variance observed in user behavior and the metrics that describe that behavior.
Is this behavior observable uniformly across geographies or are there certain cities or countries that are impacted more or less than others? Stories is video based maybe that comes into play with regions that have worse connectivity.
Are there any user segments where this is more observable? For example, if younger users grew up with Snap and IG they would be more comfortable recording stories so there would be more story content to consume amongst their friend networks.
Is this effect large on mobile compared to desktop? I would imagine Stories visually takes up more space at the top of the Newsfeed on mobile than on desktop.

Next Steps

Once we understand both what the changes are we're seeing and why they are happening we can decide upon next steps. In terms of the role they play in the bigger picture, both Stories and the Newsfeed are primarily focused on engagement and providing interesting content for users to consume. Secondarily, both provide monetization through the display of sponsored Stories or Posts.

In terms of deciding whether or not stories is a net positive for the Facebook platform we could perform an A/B test where one batch of users are shown stories at the top of the Newsfeed and the other batch is not. We could then compare the average amount of time spent in Facebook per user / week (engagement) and the average number of ad views / week (monetization) between the two groups.

Other Potential Next Steps

The above approach is a little hamfisted in the sense that we are deciding between showing Stories or not. I've been toying with the idea of showing Stories at the top of the Newsfeed sometimes or only for certain users. The rationale here is that some users may like Stories more than others, some users may generally have better quality Story content from their network, and the quality of story content is dynamic. If a user's best friend or sibling uploads a story they are probably going to want to view it at the top of their Newsfeed, but if it's a slow day for stories and nothing from their close friends is there they probably would rather see their Newsfeed. One of the downsides of thos conditional approach is that it could be confusing to users to have UI elements appear and disappear.

Perhaps a better approach would be to weave stories into the Newsfeed amongst the posts and pictures. This way we could only show the most interesting Stories to the user without always taking up real estate at the top of the Newsfeed. Additionally, if users intentionally were looking to see Stories we could have a dedicated Stories button in the lefthand nav sidebar.

Summary

First we would drill down and really understand what is really happening in terms of engagement with Stories and the Newsfeed. Next we would perform an A/B test to evaluate whether or not Stories is a net positive for the Facebook platform based upon Engagemnt and Monetization metrics. Finally, we would consider exploring other options for integrating Stories into Facebook for a best of both worlds approach.

GS91 · Answer 5 · 2022-02-03T20:11:13+0000

Facebook Stories is a short-byte-sized interactive medium to share updates with one's friends which can be seen by scrolling vertically and viewing, sharing, liking/commenting.

whereas Facebook Newsfeed is the more traditional vertically stacked queue of posts that are shown basis of your behavior and your social graph on Facebook.

The overall goal with both Stories and Newsfeed is to have more and more people share and receive updates about what's happening around and stay connected.

Few Clarifying Questions

When you say Engagement has dropped, there could be multiple ways to define engagement such as-

Number of stories viewed per user vs Number of feed posts viewed per user

or

Number of stories commented per user vs Number of feed posts

or

Time spent on Stories per user vs same for Newsfeed

First of all, has there been any change in the reporting tool or the logic which throws out these numbers? Has there been any fault in the system .. If not, I would like to ask about

Is this a global trend or it is for a specific region?

Is this across Web and App? And within App, is it the same for Android and iOS?

For what time period have we been seeing this? Is the drop sustained? Is there some seasonality to play?

Have we recently shipped any change that may have resulted in this? Maybe, improving the positioning or the % of real estate devoted to stories?

Have we benefitted from issues/bugs at competitors' in the stories space resulting in greater traction at our end?

Now, We should check how the main metrics of facebook performed meanwhile?

Has the downloads or signups reduced?

Has the time spent of facebook per user decreased?

Has the DAU, MAU decreased?

Has the overall revenue of Facebook decreased?

Basis the impact on the core metrics, we will pick up the one that has shown negative growth and try and solve for that specific goal.

Has something specifically dropped or all of them are seeing a similar trend.