MUMBAI: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision of Stories as the future of the social media giant is gradually becoming a reality. While investors kept an eye on the advertising revenue coming from Stories, the company definitely did not disappoint. More importantly, Stories is growing quickly not only on Instagram which just passed 500 million daily active users on stories but also on the Facebook blue app.

The media tech company claimed in an earnings call after posting Q4 results that 2 million advertisers are using Stories to reach customers across all its apps. As more users are also starting to use Stories, this is emerging as a promising area of opportunity for marketers. According to Facebook, it is trying to make it easier for advertisers to adopt its campaigns for Stories. It even launched ads in Messenger Stories in the last quarter but feels it is too early to talk about monetisation.

Mumbai-based Digital marketing agency DigiChefs co-founder Deep Mehta also thinks Stories will gain more popularity as the language of communication moves to more instantaneous and visual ones. According to him, users today have a tendency to first see what's happening 'right now' as soon as they open their favourite social media app via the Stories and then move to the newsfeed.

Mehta said that from the advertising point of view as well it's no secret that brands running ads in Stories usually end up seeing a better Click Through Rate. He added that if someone has not exploited the power of Story ads yet, it's time to jump in.

“Though for now, there's quite some time for advertisers to have their campaigns circled only around Stories and the feed ads are pretty much indispensable, it will be interesting to see how advertisers use the AR enabled stories and features like Instagram carousel ads to their advantage. As a performance agency, I would definitely insist my clients to bet their monies on Story ads in the long run with a creative strategy suited to showcase their propositions visually without being to pushy,” he added.

However, compared to Facebook, there has been a faster adoption of the feature on Instagram. Despite the decrease in the average price per ad, the number of ad impressions across Facebook apps increased by 34 per cent. According to Facebook, the impression growth was primarily driven by ads on Instagram, including both feed and Stories.

“While we have opportunities to grow impressions on Facebook and Instagram, that's less so in feed, where we already have healthy ad loads in - on both surfaces and more in Stories where we have lower CPMs. So - whereas in 2018, we benefited from strong impressions growth on Instagram in both feed and Stories. We'll be more reliant on Stories impression growth in 2019,” Facebook CFO David Wehner commented.

Facebook rolled out ephemeral stories in its mobile apps back in 2017 resembling Snapchat, which invented the Stories format way earlier in 2013. While the success of the feature was uncertain, Facebook first spoke about its growth in 2018. After acquiring a 150 million daily active user count for its Snapchat Stories clone, the social media network went down the path of advertising.

It is now gearing up to put more efforts into popularising it on Facebook too. As the platform is eying more advertisers for Stories, Facebook will bring more ad formats for the product also. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said it is focusing on making the format of Stories easier for marketers to help them to get the best ROI. According to Sandberg, both large advertisers and small advertisers are adopting the format.

“Now right now, one of the interesting things about Stories is there's a benefit to being an early adopter. So the pricing is really attractive. And so we think the mix shift to Stories is a big opportunity for us and it's going to take time to continue to get advertisers in, but we're very happy with demand to date,” Sandberg added.

"From a pricing perspective, we've got to improve our ability to grow the number of advertisers using Stories and improve price there, but it's going to be more reliant on that in terms of revenue growth,” Wehner added. However, he also added there’s a scope to improve pricing as well as number of advertisers using Stories.

Facebook's CEO also spoke on a highly optimistic note about the potential of Stories. Zuckerberg has put his faith on Stories too along with core News Feed work for growth of the business over the next year. But he admitted that they have to work a lot to monetise Stories at the same level of News Feed.

“Stories on Facebook is growing quickly. I think we're going to get to where we need to get to there. We started a little bit later, and some of the early execution, I think, wasn't as good as it needed to be. But I think we're doing good work there now and it's growing quite quickly. So I'm confident about where we're going to be there,” Zuckerberg added.

Though the feature is being adopted first on WhatsApp also, Facebook does not have a plan to launch ads there in near term given the consumer experience-centric focus on the messaging app.