Why Stories is the most copied -- and most failed -- social media feature
These days, one symptom of careless product development I see is copying features without understanding the deeper user need.
Need examples? All the Stories copycats that rolled out and rolled back (on LinkedIn, Twitter, soon to be Tiktok).
Here’s why they are bound to fail: Stories feature is copied wholesale, when there were no complementary benefits it brought to the platform and the end user.
Before we do a deep-dive into the specifics, a story:
A taco place was located in a quaint and hip part of town. One day, the owner decided to buy a neon “OPEN” sign to draw in more customers at night. It worked. Most of the other stores on the same street would close at 9pm, but new customers driving by saw the “OPEN” neon sign at the taco place and would stop to grab a bite or two. Business started booming at night and transformed the taco place.
The taco place owner told this trick to his 2 friends, a bar owner and a burger joint owner. Both were ecstatic, and decided to buy neon “OPEN” signs of their own to try out.
Months go by, and neither of them saw any bumps in customers. After a year, they dejectedly took the signs down.
Why didn’t the “OPEN” neon sign work for either the bar or the burger joint?
It turns out that the bar was located in the party district, with its streets already filled with neon signs. The “OPEN” sign at the bar just kind of blended in, and any pedestrian walking down the street would not notice it against the backdrop of screaming lights.
And the burger joint? It’s not open past 8pm, so the sign was only on when there’s sunlight out, making it barely noticeable.
The moral of the story is that what works for one business might not work for others. Each business has its unique customers, customer needs and situational contexts. Borrowing hacks wholesale would not guarantee success.
This is unfortunately what I’ve noticed with more and more tech companies -- to copy features from competitors without an intuitive hypothesis for why this feature would be useful for its users. What we end up seeing are the same features copy-pasted across our social media apps, rolled out for 6-12 months to monitor results, and rolled back when there is less traction than desired.
Instead, the Stories feature thrived on platforms where it provided a complementary job-to-be-done to the core offering, and as a result strategically transformed the platform in the eyes of its users.
Here’s a breakdown of why I think the Stories feature worked for some platforms and not others:
Snapchat:
The original creator of Stories, Snapchat understood its users extremely well. The job-to-be-done (JTBD) for its core messaging function was to send goofy photos of yourself to friends in a 1:1 or 1:few format. But to keep your friends updated, you need to initiate a photo post in each chat / group chat. It becomes cumbersome if you have lots of friend circles to keep updated.
Enter the Stories feature, where you can post ephemeral content that shows up to all your friends. You can keep them updated on what you’re doing or feeling without having to initiate the post for every chat. Alternatively, if you want to make Stories viewable by anyone, it becomes a ‘Day in the life’ type of ephemeral diary that anyone can access.
What you can see with Snapchat Stories is it’s complementary to the original JTBD of its core messaging feature. It transformed Snapchat from a messaging platform into a social media platform, without taking away from the core of what makes it special.
Complementary Job-to-be-done (JTBD): give all my friends or connections a candid glimpse into my life, without the mental burden of judgment or misuse
Platform strategy shift: Messaging platform → messaging + social media platform
Instagram:
Instagram copied Stories from Snapchat, which exploded in popularity. By happenstance, the JTBD of Instagram Stories plugged a hole left behind by its core feed. The core feed emphasized perfection and aesthetics, which made creating posts burdensome. Creators made 1-2 posts a day after hours of agonizing over the perfect raw photo, filter, captions and hashtags.
Stories, on the other hand, removed the barrier for creating perfect content. Because Stories disappear in 24 hours, users created more genuine snapshots of their lives in-between perfect posts. Again, Stories were an excellent complement to the original JTBD of perfect pictures, transforming the platform with an added air of authenticity.
Complementary JTBD: Showcase more authentic snapshots of my life, without the burdens of creating perfection
Platform strategy shift: Perfection → perfection + authenticity
Twitter Fleets:
Gotta give Twitter some credit here -- they rolled out Fleets with a hypothesis and did a number of iterations to address the core problems. However, none of the hypotheses turned out to be true.
Twitter’s Fleets was originally rolled out to “address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting” (source). However, two issues with that: 1) given the design of the Twitter Home Feed, Tweets are pretty much ephemeral to the audience, and 2) anyone who has used Fleets can tell you that creating Tweets is much easier than creating Fleets. With Tweets all you need are 140 characters of a thought. With Fleets you need to select multimedia + overlay your thoughts over them. So the original hypothesis that Fleets are lower barriers to entry = false.
It’s no surprise that those who ended up using Fleets were existing Twitter power users. The JTBD that those power users found was that Fleets allowed them to showcase immersive multimedia. That could be a complementary JTBD to the core offering, but I imagine Twitter’s currently focused on content generation for new users (rather than giving power users more ways to express themselves).
From there, Fleets underwent a number of iterations. My theory is that through user research, Twitter team found that new users weren’t using Fleets because of the higher barrier to creation, and that new users have a visibility problem -- they don’t have enough followers who’d be interested in their Fleets. So Twitter underwent a number of iterations, by expanding Fleet viewership to those who don’t follow you & embedding ‘Related Fleets’ into Tweets. Imagine how irrelevant Fleets became for viewers as a result!
It was no surprise that Fleets was rolled back in July so Twitter can focus on other experiments that gained better traction, like Spaces.
Hypothesized Complementary JTBD: Lower the mental barrier for creating content
Why it didn’t work: Higher mental barrier for creating a Fleet compared to a Tweet; low visibility; low relevance. Overall, no complementary JTBD with its core offering.
Iterations Twitter did:
Making Fleets viewable by a wider audience, including those who don’t follow you
Giving Fleets more entry points and relevance, through Related Fleets
LinkedIn Stories:
LinkedIn rolled out their version of Stories in February 2020, with the original hypothesis to reduce the barrier of creating content. Similar to Twitter, the mental barrier hypothesis is unfounded, given that content on the LinkedIn Feed is already pretty ephemeral and easy to create.
However, what’s unique about LinkedIn is that if you’ve invested time and effort into creating multimedia content, you will want that content to be a permanent part of your professional brand. We see that already with coaches and gurus alike creating videos on Tiktok for brand-building, and are getting massive traction.
LinkedIn could have iterated on its Stories feature by 1) making them permanent, and 2) pinning Stories to the top of both Home and Profile feeds for more visibility. However, it looks like LinkedIn is taking an equally interesting pivot into Tiktok territory. I look forward to their future tests with engaging videos and multimedia as its next iteration.
Hypothesized Complementary JTBD: informal way to share multimedia updates to your professional network, without any mental burdens (due to ephemerality)
Why it didn’t work: people actually want their Stories content to be brand-building and permanent
Future Iterations: Tiktok/‘Reels’ feature instead of Stories
Tiktok Stories:
Oh Tiktok, what are you trying to do?
Tiktok recently rolled out its own version of Stories and I am unsure about its hypothesis. Similar to LinkedIn and Twitter, Tiktok core videos are already 1) easy to create, and 2) basically ephemeral.
As an avid Tiktok consumer, I subscribe to 300+ creators, and have only seen at most 3 creators use Stories at any given time. The value proposition of Tiktok Stories is unclear to both creators and consumers, and the only time where I’ve seen some value was for creators notifying consumers of an upcoming video. (If notifications were the original intent for the Stories feature, then a notifications/community feed would be a better solution).
Tiktok has since embedded Stories from people I don’t follow into my Home Feed, making it a terrible experience all around. Because there is no complementary benefit to the core videos, I am skeptical that Stories will become useful long-term.
Hypothesized Complementary JTBD: To reduce the barrier for creating content
How creators are actually using it: Notifications to viewers about upcoming content
My verdict: Low usefulness and relevance, unknown complementary benefit to its core offering
Summary
Social media platforms are in the attention economy - they are incentivized to capture more and more eyeballs. However, product development is a lot more nuanced than copying and pasting features. There needs to be a complementary (non-competing) JTBD that the new feature brings to the core offering, which leads to a strategic transformation of the platform.
The best way to identify these strategic JTBDs is to deeply understand your users. Customer insights, combined with product intuition, make product development more powerful. Through constant learning and iterations, we can hone our original thesis and make features more useful. Without a deep understanding of the users and their needs, these features will never get a fighting chance to succeed.
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