In
social media
Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...
, a story is a function in which the user tells a narrative or provides status messages and information in the form of short, time-limited clips from several automatically running sequences. A story is usually displayed on a user's profile page and thus represents an audiovisual extension to the text-based status function.
Definition
A story is usually a short, automatic sequence of images or videos that is divided into several sequences, which is accompanied by backgrounds, music, texts, stickers, animations, effects and emojis. The aim of stories is to tell a narrative (e.g. an everyday experience) or to convey a message. Most stories cannot be changed afterwards and are only available for a short time. Hashtags, tagging, and location the reach of a stories can also be added. As with other functions in social networks, the visibility of the stories for groups of people can be adjusted in the settings. Stories are almost exclusively created on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet computer and are usually displayed vertically.
History
With the advent of better cell phone cameras and the increasing popularity of internet-enabled mobile apps, the need has also increased to extend the status function, which has been around for a long time in social networks, to the multimedia area and thereby remove functions of the feed.
In October 2013,
Snapchat
Snapchat is an American multimedia instant messaging app and service developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc. One of the principal features of Snapchat is that pictures and messages are usually only available for a short time before the ...
first introduced the story function. This is a series of snaps that together tell a narrative through a chronological order. A story is deleted after 24 hours. Snapchat became very well known and popular with teenagers because of this feature, among other things. Later other apps would copied this feature. In October 2015, Twitter introduced the story feature called Moments. In 2016, Google introduced the Google AMP Stories service, which enables mobile websites to load faster and be presented in the format of a stories.
In August 2016,
Instagram
Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can ...
introduced a stories function that deletes the content after 24 hours. The media has often accused the site of copying Snapchat.
In February 2017, the instant messenger WhatsApp introduced the Now Status stories function in beta, which was later renamed Status. In March 2017, a story function was introduced in
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
for
Facebook Messenger
Messenger is a proprietary instant messaging app and platform developed by Meta Platforms. Originally developed as Facebook Chat in 2008, the company revamped its messaging service in 2010, released standalone iOS and Android apps in 2011, and ...
. In August 2018,
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...
introduced a stories function that initially was limited to pictures, but now also supports short video clips.
In August 2018, the
GIF
The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...
website
Giphy
Giphy ( ), styled as GIPHY, is an American online database and search engine that allows users to search for and share short looping videos with no sound that resemble animated GIF files.
History
Beginnings and early history
Giphy was founded ...
introduced a story function. Also,
Netflix
Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a fil ...
has been experimenting in June 2019 in the mobile app version a stories featuring film trailer and teaser.
In March 2022,
TikTok
TikTok, known in China as Douyin (), is a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 15 seconds to 10 minutes.
TikTok is an international version ...
added the story feature which allowed users to create 15 second long videos that delete after 24 hours.
Usage statistics
In 2019, around 1.5 billion people worldwide every day on average use the stories function in a social network or messenger. In the period between the end of 2018 and April 2019, the growth on the Facebook Messenger Stories service increased in particular. Younger people in particular use this function. More than 20% people aged 18 to 24 use Instagram Stories, while it is just under 2% of those over 55. On Snapchat use in March 2019 after
Statista
Statista is an online platform specialized in market and consumer data, which offers statistics & reports, market insights, cosumer insights and company insights in German, English, Spanish and French. In addition to publicly available thi ...
over 190 million users the function on Facebook over 500 million, to more than 500 million Whatsapp and Instagram in December 2018 and over 500 million. On Facebook, an average of 150 million users use the function per day, 300 million on Instagram, 450 million on WhatsApp and 70 million on Facebook Messenger.
In a Facebook survey of 18,000 participants from 12 countries, 68% said they used the stories function at least once a month. It is stated that this influences their purchasing behavior and the advertising website they visited. Stories in the areas of fashion and tourism are particularly popular.
The website ''Fanpage Karma'' analyzed several Instagram accounts according to the size of the profiles and determined the average reach of posts and stories per follower. It turned out that posts have a higher reach than stories, which often have less than half the reach.
In online marketing
Due to the increasing popularity of the stories, it is not only used by private individuals, but also an important part of
social media marketing
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Although the terms e-marketing and digital marketing are still dominant in academia, social media marketing is becoming more popular for ...
. From an ephemeral perspective, Instagram stories for example have proven to be to be useful to brands for things such as digital campaigns, content marketing, and overall communication. Above all, it is important to convey a brand authentically, visually, but also personally and entertainingly to advertisers using the stories function. Instagram also recognized the potential for charity campaigns and introduced a donation function for stories in July 2019.
Further reading
* Menon, Devadas (2022-05-01). "Updating 'Stories' on social media and its relationships to contextual age and narcissism: A tale of three platforms – WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook". ''Heliyon''. 8 (5). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e09412
* Ruth Page: Narratives Online: Shared Stories in Social Media,
Cambridge University
, mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts.
Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge.
, established =
, other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
Press, 2018,
References
{{Online social networking
Social media
Web series
Blogging
Internet culture
Digital marketing