Facebook To Launch A New Product As Instagram Stories Reaches 500 Million Daily Users

Last Wednesday, Facebook announced that Instagram Stories currently has 500 million users every day to share what they are doing with their followers. This number accounts for half of 1 billion Instagram's current users and it has increased significantly from 400 million daily active users reported last year. Facebook's Instagram Stories have an operating method like Snapchat, and there are currently 2 million advertisers signing up to advertise on this feature.

Nearly half of Instagram users use the daily Stories feature

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the Stories feature is one of Facebook's last major changes, but after a while focusing on consolidating security and defense of the platform, the company decided to create new improvements to improve the users' experience. Zuckerberg revealed some plans that Facebook will focus on developing this year in the fourth quarter of 2018 earnings call.

• In order to increase security and privacy for users, the company will put ephemerality and encryption into more features.
• Facebook's messaging apps like WhatsApp and Messenger will be developed to become the user's main social activity center.
• WhatsApp payments will come to more countries
• Stories feature will have private sharing modes.
• Groups will be on par with family and friends when it becomes an organizational function of the platform.
• Videos will be transferred from News Feed to Facebook Watch and Zuckerberg hopes that it will become the trend of 2019.
• AR and AV will be the two emerging focus areas of Facebook along with the appearance of Oculus Quest in this spring.
• New features will appear on Instagram shopping and commercial services.

According to the first report from Mike Isaac of the New York Times referring to the unified messaging infrastructure of Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger and adding end-to-end encryption to all three platforms. Mark Zuckerberg said the purpose of conducting the plan is to improve the user experience, not increase the company's revenue. Specifically, buyers and sellers on the Marketplace in many countries that regularly use WhatsApp as the main messaging application will interact and chat on that platform, not Facebook Messenger.

Even those who use Messenger as their SMS application on Android devices, those messages will also be sent by encryption. Facebook's senior executive said that coding expansion on platforms is a necessary action to protect the privacy and security of users on the Internet because their data will not be stored in the company server. Zuckerberg also stressed that the process to do this will take a long time, it is expected to be completed next year.

Messages of the platforms will be encrypted

Facebook-owned apps include Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, totaling 2.7 billion monthly users worldwide. CRO David Wehner says:

Through Facebook executives' statements, we can see that they are aware of the fact that classic social network users are moving to messaging apps and Instagram.