Stories and videos are emphasizing Facebook's growth, according to its earning report.
The company may have become rather sluggish in delivering updates to its core platform. But when it comes to Instagram, the social giant is putting a bit more priority when it comes to launching new features. And this time, it's giving the photo and video-sharing social networking service an updates.
Here, Instagram has added an option where users can share IGTV content to their Stories.
According to the social media giant, Stories are the future of social sharing, and that video demand remains very high. For this reason, Facebook wants Instagram users to tap into both trends, while the company works to find better ways to monetize the two offerings.
Now you can share your favorite IGTV videos to your story. Tap the paper airplane at the bottom of the video you want to share. When friends see your story, they can tap the preview to watch the whole video in IGTV. pic.twitter.com/oaatUoOqZY
— Instagram (@instagram) November 1, 2018
Previously, it was only possible to add a link to an IGTV video on business accounts, which allowed users to swipe up and watch the full IGTV video. With the update, Instagram is allowing users to share a preview of any IGTV video to their stories.
This is similar to the feature that allows users to instantly repost Stories they’re mentioned in.
To add a video to Stories, Instagram users can tap on the paper airplane icon to open up an option where they can 'Add video to your story'. After doing this, friends can simply tap on the preview to go watch the entire video on IGTV.
The feature is its effort to bridge the gap between IGTV (which also has a standalone app), and the main Instagram app.
With IGTV, Instagram wants to re-envision mobile video and compete with the likes of YouTube. The feature plays vertical videos from the people users have followed, and shows personalized recommendations from other users.
However, IGTV has not taken off the way Instagram would have hoped. First off, it's only more than short clips feature Instagram already has. It didn't give anything significant as such, that it's not hard to see how a more dedicated video platform like YouTube can manage to get away unharmed.
Its inability to attract creators and publishers to its video platform has been attributed to it still being something of a novelty.
Without enough content and bigger audience, Facebook had difficulties in monetizing Instagram's video platform.
But still, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has plans to grow the option.
The Stories feature which Instagram copied from Snapchat, has already been a popular feature on the social media. With the 'Add video to your story' feature, Instagram is relying on Stories to drive more eyeballs to IGTV. In turn, this would drive more engagement on IGTV, as the company aims to speed up the launch of ad offerings.
Since Instagram is Facebook's, it's obvious that Facebook is using its massive influence and scale to enable easier sharing of IGTV contents and boosting its organic promotion through existing channels.