Facebook continues to explore ways to get more people posting to Stories, this time via a new, automated Stories generation process that uses image recognition AI to create new Stories from your shared content.
As you can see in this example, posted by Jacki Pitkow (and shared by Matt Navarra), some users are now being prompted to use a new feature that Facebook’s calling ‘Advanced Stories’.
As described by Facebook:
“Allow Facebook to suggest high-quality, ready-made stories for you using advanced photo and video data, including image quality, location, the presence of people or animals.”
The process will generate Stories based on images that you’ve uploaded to the app, using thematic matching to provide templated frames that you can then share with your audience.
Which feels a little inauthentic – but maybe, if it were available to business pages, it could be a handy tool for brands to help create batch content, and highlight specific products or themes in a reminder post.
For regular users, you can imagine that some will be keen to show off baby photos, for example, or wedding pictures, or a Story based around a beloved pet. There could be potential there, and based on the success of Facebook’s Memories element, there’s clearly a level of add-on engagement to be gleaned from tools like this, even if they do feel somewhat artificial in nature.
Both Facebook and Instagram have been looking to better align with behavioral shifts towards Stories and private messaging, with Meta’s own data showing that users are now posting far less original content to the news feed than they have in times past. People are still consuming content in the main feed, with Meta’s advancing AI recommendations helping to keep people scrolling for longer, but Meta also needs to ensure that people continue to glean real value from their in-app experience. And for Facebook, that comes from engaging with their friends and family, via their established social graph, which is an element that other apps can’t replicate.
Years of angst and division on social platforms have made people increasingly wary about sharing in public, which is part of why this activity is switching to DMs, though Stories also remains an engaging element, with the temporary nature of the format likely holding more appeal than posting to your profile, and having it remain there forever (or till you delete it).
As such, Meta’s working to build more tools to align with this, while its new DM tools like Channels and Notes on IG also fit into this push.
Maybe it’ll help to keep that personal engagement going – or maybe people won’t care about automated Stories, and it’ll fall by the wayside.
Likely worth an experiment, either way.