With every social media platform updating their app with a story feature, YouTube has also hopped in the moving train. Snapchat started it, Facebook and Instagram tried to imitate it. And even LinkedIn has its own variation.
Taking into consideration that YouTube is arguably the world’s largest video sharing website, it only makes sense for it to follow suit. YouTube first announced its stories feature in around November last year. This story feature was known as Reels and was allowed to be tested by only a few selected creators.
Last week YouTube said, “Creating with stories is lightweight, easy, and fun. Stories will have the fun creation tools that you know and love, you can add text, music, filters, Youtubey stickers, and more to make your story uniquely you! To create a story, just open the YouTube mobile app, tap on the video camera icon, and select ‘Create Story’.”
Key features of YouTube stories:
1. Accessibility
The YouTube version of stories differs from the others. The major difference is its accessibility. This is basically designed for influencers and bloggers as YouTube stories are only accessible to people who have 10,000 or more subscribers.
Creators who are eligible to use this feature can use stories to add text, filters, stickers, music and more to their videos.
2. Time Span
The second major difference between YouTube stories and the rest of the social media platforms is how long it takes for them to disappear. Each story stays up for 7 days before disappearing whereas stories on most other social media platforms stay for just 24 hours after posting.
3. Interaction and Responses
The span during which the stories are up, viewers can comment, as questions, give a thumbs up or thumbs down and appears to both subscribers and non-subscribers. However, the creator of the story can only respond with either an image or a video.
Users are actually not quite happy about the feature of ‘selective usage’. This means that only creators with a certain a fanbase of over 10K can use this feature. That, of course, could change if the format gains popularity. We’re certain YouTube will be keen on updating this feature if users get used to stories and view them at a high rate.
Why are stories important?
The reason why video creators find stories helpful is because they appear on the top of the page. This makes the creator stay relevant in the minds of his or her followers. Viewers also tend to browse through more frequently as they are easy to view and aren’t time-consuming.
Will others follow suit?
For YouTube, adding this new feature makes sense as it increases the viewers’ interest. Nowadays, stories are the fastest growing social sharing options. More than a billion people now use stories every day across Facebook’s family of apps alone (WhatsApp Status, Messenger, Facebook stories, and Instagram stories).
Reels may not be a hit to everyone, but it has to be viewed as one of the rising features because people may not put up videos every day, but they sure can post stories almost every day.
Taking into consideration the current scenario, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Pinterest and Twitter coming up with something similar in the future!
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