Instagram Stories: Users can get lots more views with new Facebook tie-in

The move will please heavy social media users

Aatif Sulleyman
Thursday 05 October 2017 12:04 BST
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(Getty)

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Facebook and Instagram have tied their platforms closer together, in a setup that will satisfy heavy social media sharers.

Some users now have the ability to post Stories to both social networks simultaneously.

Previously, if you wanted to share the same Story to Instagram and Facebook, you’d have had to record it on one of the apps, save the post and then publish it twice.

From a user’s perspective, the move unlocks a much bigger audience of potential Stories viewers.

However, the tie-in could help Facebook enormously.

Stories – which was ripped from Snapchat – became an official Facebook feature earlier this year, but it’s yet to take off.

Despite it having pride of place at the top of the News Feed, most Facebook users are ignoring it, possibly because the Facebook Camera is still relatively new and unfamiliar.

On the other hand, Instagram Stories – which launched last August – has been hugely successful, and has 250 million users.

TechCrunch says the cross-platform Story sharing option should come to everyone soon, but it’s currently only designed to work in one direction: from Instagram to Facebook.

According to a recent report, young social media users are “less-engaged” with Facebook than they are with rival social networks, and are therefore leaving the site, logging in less frequently and spending less and less time on it.

Instagram and Snapchat, however, are continuing to thrive because they use more “visual content”, the report added.

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