In 2022, TikTok is on track to reach 1.5 billion with its many features and updates to monetize content and enable creators to generate revenue from TikTok stories and their videos.
Incidentally, the social video platform is reportedly testing a new Stories feature, a project it showed off in August 2021. Recently, social media expert Matt Navarra noticed that TikTok is changing its Stories feature for the first time. Integrate into “For You”.
In this tweet we can see some major changes in Tiktok Stories:
- They now appear in the FYP feed instead of the Stories sidebar;
- They can now be seen by everyone, not just the people you follow.
TikTok is looking to integrate the creation of Stories into the main feed, which would essentially make Stories another content option. Users will be able to create multi-frame sequences of videos and stills, which they will watch in-stream just like any other short video.
So this changes completely from the first version of TikTok Stories launched in August last year, in which stories are added in a new sidebar on the left side of the screen. This version gave them a dedicated niche, but at the same time excluded users from the mainstream experience.
Result: This new optimized format doesn’t obscure the main screen with an intrusive sidebar and will expand the visualization of stories as well. These will actually be included in the regular performance rather than as an optional item.
More details are revealed by Matt Navras
- Creating a new story is now done via the ‘+’ button instead of the sidebar;
- The new story creation mode is called Accelerated;
- Tapping on the video shows the multi-part stories in your FYP;
- Stories are highlighted in your FYP with a blue “Stories” tag
In this example, the new TikTok Stories format in the feed looks like this, with the blue “Stories” marker on the first image. It also includes an indicator at the bottom of the screen that shows the total number of images in the story.
Users will then tap on the video to go to the next image, a cool way to optimize user engagement on TikTok. Plus, it will add another way to leverage content on TikTok to expand the app’s larger monetization potential.
For reference, here’s what the old version of TikTok Stories with sidebar looked like.
At the moment, it is still unclear whether the format will work or whether it will hinder users with an alternative process for viewing content. This is undoubtedly what TikTok is trying to determine at the moment, but in any case, TikTok is very determined to expand its content offering to enable effective TikTok campaigns and give creators more opportunities in the app.