Getting started with Sharing to Stories
Enable your users to share to Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories, directly from your app. Learn best practices and tips to help you get started.
Ready to start developing?
Measure twice, cut once
Set up your integration for success by thinking about product goals and design principles upfront.
Define your goal
Identifying your goal will help guide what and how to integrate Sharing to Stories. Here are a few goals our partners have shared:
- Retention: How often are users coming back?
- Engagement: How many interactions do users have? How much time do users spend?
Once you’ve defined your goal, be sure to measure baseline levels before integrating to understand the impact of this integration. If possible, put A/B tests in place to test hypotheses, such as how different sharable content performs or how different call-to-actions drive results. Learn how MuscleBooster tested and saw higher engagement among their users who shared to Facebook Stories.
MuscleBooster's integration with Facebook Stories
Viewbug's integration with Instagram Stories
Think through the user journey
Define platform approach
- Build sharing flows for Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories—offering both platforms gives your users more choice and increases your app’s distribution.
Create share-worthy content
- Work with your creative team to develop background and sticker content that is original, visual, and immersive—videos are eye-catching and work best for backgrounds.
Encourage users to share their milestones and moods
- Surface content to share at relevant moments, such as accomplishments, what they’re feeling, or a summary of their app usage. See how SNOW encouraged sharing with their integration.
Increase visibility of the sharing feature to your app users
- Get your users’ attention with prominent entry points and call-to-actions.
Design beautifully
Once you’re ready to build, take into consideration design practices like safe areas, on-brand colors, and rounded corners for stickers.
Spread the word
Once you’re done implementing, check out a few ways to help grow awareness among your user base:
Product marketing
Educate your users about sharing to Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories through channels like in-app notifications, social media posts, email marketing, blog posts, and press releases.
Social contests
Leverage the power of your users’ social network to amplify your app’s content. Holding contests and spreading the word via Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories can encourage your users to share milestones and achievements. Read how ViewBug drove social sharing among their photography community.
Influencer marketing
Explore the possibility of partnering with an influencer who is aligned with your brand and product to help amplify and promote your app.
FAQs
Ready to build, but have a few more questions? Check out our FAQs:
What’s the difference between implementing Sharing to Stories and OS share?
Implementing Sharing to Stories can help enable a more customizable creation flow for your iOS app users. For example, you can modify the entry point, share flow, and desired CTAs without being bound to OS share sheet requirements. You can also make it clearer upfront that the content is for Stories or News Feed posts.
How long does it take to integrate Sharing to Stories?
Implementing Sharing to Stories can be generally broken down into 3 phases: ideation, development, and testing. Depending on your team’s resourcing and prioritization, this can take as little as 2 weeks to a few months.
Ideation: You’ll need to decide the share flows you want to enable and the creative assets accompanying those share flows. You’ll work with your creative and design team to generate mockups of the sharing experiences.
Development: This phase includes:
- Adding a button for all share flows on each client platform and following the instructions for Sharing to Stories from our public documentations.
- Programmatically generating the creative assets to accompany each share flow.
- Indicating to the user whether the share was successful.
Depending on the complexity of the share flow (i.e. a button that will directly share to stories versus a button that opens a dialog for the user to select the asset to share, then share to stories), the implementation time will vary. Straightforward sharing implementations (i.e. adding the code snippets from the developer docs) can take a couple days for each platform (iOS/Android) and 1-2 weeks for client-side changes to update in the app stores.
Testing: buffer time for debugging your technical implementation and overall design before a public release. This feature can also be released incrementally.
What kind of content can be shared?
Apps can share a background (a color gradient, an image, or a video), and a sticker (an image). For now, stickers have to be images and cannot be a video.
What are the benefits of building on Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories?
We have over 500M daily active stories users on Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories, so building for both products helps you offer choice to your users and achieve a higher reach among your user base. Also, the integration process is similar for both stories products and requires minimal additional effort, so it’s beneficial to integrate across both at the same time.
What is the integration process like for Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories?
Assuming the creative assets to be shared are already generated and available, Sharing to Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories is quite similar with differences in a few places (i.e. using “com.facebook.stories.ADD_TO_STORY” versus “com.instagram.share.ADD_TO_STORY").
Given the minimal additional effort, we recommend you integrate across both Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories to get the most out or your integration.
What is the integration process like for iOS and Android?
The technical implementation for iOS and Android employ very similar concepts and are both quite straightforward. Once you have the creative assets developed, we recommend you develop across both platforms for maximum reach.
How do I track how many shares have happened?
Each time a user clicks on the “Share to Stories” button, your client app can log this event. Depending on your internal infrastructure, the events can then be aggregated and visualized in numerous ways.
How should I show the sharing icons?
Please reference the branding guidelines for Facebook app and Instagram.
