How To Use Facebook Story
What are facebook stories?
How does facebook Story Post differ from a facebook News Feed Post?
We're gonna go in and perform a Facebook Story Post.
And then fourth and finally, we'll go back and check and see that it has been done correctly.
So maybe you're the social media manager at a business or organization. Maybe you're the front-desk worker, or a marketer, possibly an intern at the business, or the business-owner performing the social media posts for your business or your organization yourself. Whatever the case, we know that up until now, we've probably been going along, using facebook and posting things from our facebook Page—or shame on you if you haven't been—but something's come along lately, we've noticed, called facebook "Story". We see different things, like, as we're surfing on facebook, we see little personal profile pictures, or "Business Page" profile pictures that have little blue circles around them. We see things like, whenever we're logged-on to our home feed on facebook, at the top of the page, we see little squares that are a bit larger of our friends that are on our friend-list, or businesses that we've liked, and we notice when we pick those, it shows some sort of strange thing—it's got, like, a bar that evaporates. We see little things like whenever we're trying to perform a post, we see choices of performing this as a "Story" post, performing this as a "News Feed" post. Our video, today, is going to be about four things:
So what are Facebook Stories?
Now, for our video today, we must remember two things when we're talking about using facebook; we have two different profiles that are facebook profiles: the first of the two is people like you and me, who are humans that make a personal profile on facebook; and the second, is what we call a "Facebook Page", and these are your pages for your businesses or your organizations that function similarly to personal profiles. For our video today, we're going to focus on doing it for the second of the two—the "Facebook Page", performing a "Story" post from a "Facebook Page". But there are some similarities in both, but that's going to be our focus for this video. So without further ado, *clap*, let's dive in!
It's been interesting to watch the Web and Social Media, for over 15 years now, change and evolve and adapt over time. It seems like different social media platforms will sometimes see elements of other social media platforms that seem to work well, or be popular among the consumer (like us), and then incorporate that element into their own social media platform. So, full disclosure, and disclaimer: I don't claim to know any sort of internal strategy as to why Facebook or any other social media platform does the things they do, but it just seems like this "Facebook Story" originated from a very similar concept that another social media platform, called "Snapchat", had been doing. So, the idea behind the "story"—we'll talk about how it originated in Snapchat—someone who is a registered user of Snapchat—let's say me—I'm having my phone with me, and I'm taking pictures or I'm taking video, and I then post it, and it then appends to my "Story". Other users, like friends of mine, can follow me, and view whatever I put up as my Story for about 24 hours; meaning, that, say, I take three pictures right now at different times of the day, when 24 hours is up—24 hours from the moment that a certain picture/image was uploaded to my Story—that picture or that image, then, disappears. So the idea was, is that as users of Snapchat were following their friends and looking at each others' Stories, the idea is that you get an up-to-date glimpse of what's going on in this person's life very, very recently. Because as we said, as you're going along and you take a picture, or you take a video, and you post it to your Story, 24 hours from now, that's gonna be gone forever. So it seems like facebook saw value in this, and has decided to integrate it into its system. And remember, we always talk about two different user profiles that exist on facebook: there are personal profiles—like you or me—as a person who has a profile and connects with our friends and writes posts and things like that; and second, there is the "Facebook Page", and this is, like, the organizations or businesses that have their official "Facebook Page. And both of these types of profiles are able to utilize this Story method of posting an image, and then it being there or 24 hours, and then evaporating.
What is the Difference Between a facebook Story Post and a facebook News Feed Post?
As we said, for years now, when we've been on facebook, and posting images from our facebook Pages—whether we've been on our mobile phone and we've clicked "Share", and chosen to Share to facebook, or whether we've been on our desktop or laptop computer, or our tablet, and clicked "Upload Image" and shared it that way—those have been what's called the "News Feed" post. When you visit the Page, and it shows the most recent post that's there at the top, and then as you go down, it shows different posts that have been done in times past, in a timeline (and then, of course, side-note, there *has* been the option to "Pin" a certain image to the top of your page). That is the News Feed post that we talk about. The second, and is our subject today that we're talking about, is the "Story" post. And we notice that sometimes [when we're on our] mobile phone, [and we're taking] a picture, and you would then go to "Share", on that picture, sometimes you see two different icons of facebook, and then, sometimes, one will say "Facebook", and one will say "Story", but it will have the facebook logo—keep that in mind. That's, again, the difference between the two types of posts that we can do on facebook nowadays; again, the traditional "News Feed"—which shows them in the order that you go visit them, that they've been posted—and the second, which is the "Story" that we're talking about, today.
How to Perform a facebook Story Post
For the third part of our video, we will be going through the exact method that we will use to upload an image to our facebook Story on our official facebook Page on which we are an Administrator. So you can see I've logged in to my personal facebook profile, so I'll use the top-right arrow in the top-right corner of the screen, and then click "See more" so that I get a full list of all of the facebook Pages on which I am an Administrator. For our purposes today, we will be posting the image to our Story on this company, so I will click this and allow our official company Page to load. Now, remember, as we said, there are two different types of posts we do on facebook: a regular "News Feed" post, and a "Story" post. As we've allowed our Page to load, here on our screen, as we scroll down, we can see regular facebook Feed Posts that are in the middle of the screen here. For instance, this is a post of a video that was done on February 9th, and has been Pinned to the top of the Page. If we continue to scroll down, we will see one that was done yesterday. And if we continue to scroll down, again, we continue to see in a timeline of the most recent, first, but the various posts that have been done as a regular, traditional facebook News Feed image post as we scroll down. As we go to the top of the screen, we will see that the method with which we use to do that is here in our status box, we've likely clicked "Photo" or "Video", clicked "Upload Photo/Video", and found an image we would like to choose. And that's how we have done that in times past. Notice how "News Feed" is—has a blue check-mark, because that was the method with which we were going to use to put up images. But, again, our purposes, today, are to talk about "Stories". And the way in which you post an image from your facebook Page's official "Story" is to look in the top-left of the screen where your profile picture is, and there's a little blue-and-white plus-arrow. Click that little circle, and you'll see a dialogue box pop up that looks very similar to the dialogue box we saw a moment ago. It asks us to click "Photo/Video" to choose an image on our hard-drive we would like to upload. Once again, we'll click "Upload" videos, again, we'll choose this image, today, just for our purposes, here. Notice it's loading a preview in the thumbnail, we can type a little caption...and then before we click "Share Now", let's take note of two things: As we've kept saying, there's a difference between a traditional facebook "News Feed" post and a "Story" post. Whenever you have clicked the little blue and white circle, and chose an image in this way, the chooser, then, gives us one more opportunity that the image we have chosen, in our thumbnail, here, and the caption alongside of the post—do we want to post this on our Page's "Story" or on our "News Feed", or both? For our purposes today, we're focusing on doing the "Story", so I will *UN*-check the box for "News Feed", I will make sure that the "Your Page's Story" has a check-mark, and I'll click "Share Now". Notice on the top-left corner of our screen, where our profile picture is, there's a little blue circle circulating, it kinda does that as it's uploading the image, and really just performing our post for us. Eventually, you should see that the blue line becomes static. Sometimes, I see that the blue line continues to rotate and fill, as if it's continued-uploading, but a lot of times it *is* finished. But here, for right now it looks like it *is* finished. So just for good measure, let's refresh our browser again, and allow our Page to fully load, and we see that there is this blue circle around our profile picture. If we click the top part of this, this gives us a little thumbnail into what our "Story" post looks like. This is the image we chose, and the little caption we wrote at the bottom, there.
Checking That Our facebook Story Post was Completed Successfully
For the fourth and final part of our video, we will go back and perform a check to make sure that it seems like the "Story" post we executed, in fact, finished properly. So we've got a mobile device, here, which we'll turn on, and it will load our facebook homepage from our facebook, scroll to the top, here, and we can see the various rectangles that represent "Stories" of other facebook Pages, or our "Friends", that post to their own stories. If you'll note, you see our company, here, where we posted our Story. Pick the image, and as it loads up, we'll see that it looks like it has the caption "This is an image" at the bottom...it looks like our Story was a success.
That concludes the video on facebook "Story" posts, I hope it made sense to you. I, really, made the video, because, a lot of times, I'll be using social media platforms, like facebook or others, an if I hit a snag, sometimes it's difficult to come across "Help" topics. And I also know that, sometimes, folks get caught up using a social media platform—like facebook—in some kinda way, and when different changes happen, sometimes it's a little weird to try to roll with the punches, or figure out what's going on. So, make sure you visit the "Comments" below; I'd love to hear your feedback on the video, as well as whatever "Stories" you may have, of using the "Facebook Story"—no pun intended. And, also, make sure you check out my other videos, as well.
