Set goals for Meta (Facebook) Stories.
Meta- Dianne Stinger
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.