Facebook Stories Available to Pages; 3D and VR In the Newsfeed Too

Facebook is Beefing Up Its Platform…

Facebook has been busy these last couple weeks. They made five large announcements. We’ll cover each, and why you should care, below.

  1. Facebook Stories for Pages

facebook stories for pages

Facebook Stories for Pages – Image via TechCrunch

People will officially be seeing Facebook Stories from Pages they follow or Like in the Stories section on mobile and desktop. Facebook announced last week that you can port over stories to FB from Instagram. Now, Page admins will see a “Create Story” button on the mobile app when viewing their Pages.

Facebook has yet to share a daily user metric for Facebook Stories, but we do know that Instagram Stories hit 100 million users just two months after launching.

We’ll see how Stories on Facebook performs, but what we do know is that Facebook is pushing it hard. That’s why, as a brand, you should be utilizing Facebook Stories in your own social strategy. That, and Groups of course (more to come on that in a future blog post).

2. Facebook 3D Posts – Virtual Reality in the News Feed

facebook 3d posts vr

Facebook 3D Posts – Image via TechCrunch

Facebook just announced 3D posts, a new type of News Feed post where users can grab, spin and interact with a 3D object to look at it from all angles. Facebook acquired Oculus a couple years ago and wants to push creators to make virtual objects using the Oculus platform. In the near future, Facebook is working on an API to let third-party VR app developers give users the option to share their creations to the News Feed. Take a look at the video below.

Ben Smith@benasmith

posts come to the Facebook News Feed! Create objects in and share to Facebook for anyone to see and interact with.

We’ve updated our Facebook Newsfeed algorithm piece with the change.

3. Facebook to Launch ‘Venues’ for VR Programming

facebook venues virtual reality

Facebook Venues for VR – Image via TechCrunch

Facebook also announced plans to launch a virtual reality “Venues” app next year that Zuckerberg said will allow people to “watch live concerts, and live sports, and premieres of movies and TV shows, all around the world with friends” and other people.

4. Facebook “Sets”

facebook sets

Facebook just announced that they are testing a feature called “Sets” that allows you select several status updates, photos or videos and share them as a themed collection to everyone or specific friends. Sound familiar, Pinterest?

It appears that links will be able to be included as well.

5. Facebook acquires popular teen app “TBH”

facebook acquires tbh

Facebook just bought the popular app “tbh” (slang for to be honest) for an undisclosed amount. Why is this important? Two primary reasons. One – Facebook’s weakness is teens, and tbh is extremely popular among teens. Two – tbh only launched a few months ago and is approaching 6 million loyal users. Check out the screenshot of the top App Store rankings below, courtesy of Product Hunt:

With all these announcements, Facebook is clearly looking to separate itself from their competitors and become the one-stop destination for social, content, video, and VR.

Brands – prepare accordingly.

Author

Brandon Doyle

CEO + Founder