Facebook: Over half a billion people use Stories everyday in APAC

Facebook has been pushing Stories for sometime now. A format that was arguably popularised by Snapchat a few years ago, Facebook and its subsidiaries rolled out their versions of the format across multiple platforms to varying degrees of success.

Instagram Stories, of course, has been a popular feature—I genuinely find myself looking through stories a lot more often than I scroll through my feed—but perhaps Facebook Stories and to a greater extent, WhatsApp Stories aren’t quite as popular. Still, Facebook has announced that they’ve seen a rise in popularity from users in the Asian Pacific region towards Stories, with a total of more than half a billion daily users reported.

This indicates a move towards the Stories format for those in the APAC region, which is hardly surprising. In the fast-moving world that we live in, social media is often best consumed in the form of bite-sized content—plus, Stories also offer a more candid feel to videos/photos than the feed.

Using trends to help businesses

That’s in line with a general trend, with Facebook saying that the APAC region is a hugely important growth driver for Facebook. More than a billion users access Facebook on a monthly basis—with a reported population of around 4.3 billion residents, this means that 1 in 4 people in the region are monthly active users of Facebook.

And the growth of mobile subscribers or users in the APAC region is pretty huge, too. According to Facebook, 61% of all new mobile subscriptions (as of October 2019) are from the APAC region, dwarfing the 25% from the EMEA and Americas regions.

And this shift towards mobiles is something that the company is looking to leverage off when the commercial side of the platform. 20 billion messages were sent between businesses and users on Facebook Messenger this year—more than double the 8 billion recorded in 2018—and this is something for businesses to take into account as well.

“People expect to communicate with businesses in much the same way as they message with their friends. As people increasingly use messaging apps, we’re helping businesses make the shift too.”

That’s part of the bigger picture, of course. Facebook has been making moves towards the commerce scene for awhile now. WhatsApp Catalogs is a feature targeted towards entrepreneurs who wish to display their goods on their WhatsApp Business profiles, while Facebook Pay is already available in the U.S. (Facebook says that this feature will be globally rolled out across Instagram and WhatsApp at some point in the future).

And a big part of that is recognising that trends towards e-commerce is changing. “Conversational commerce” is something that was mentioned a few times during the recent APAC Facebook Press Day—and it basically takes into account the interactions between customers and businesses.

Ultimately, Facebook is looking to leverage off the increased access to mobile internet: “The ways people discover new products is very much about a connected experience.”

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