Case Study: Facebook Story Midcards
Context
Facebook stories are image posts that disappear after 24 hours. Story midcards are quick promotions that appear in between them. One way to think of them is as first-party ads. They drive growth by encouraging people to create, interact with friends, and see things they might have missed. That said, most story midcards are designed to encourage sharing by offering a ready-to-share suggestion from the user’s camera roll.
I’ve been the primary content designer on Facebook Story midcards as the for about as long as they’ve been around, and my approach to their content design has gone through several iterations.
Challenge
With story midcards, your biggest challenge is time. Because stories are all on a timer, midcards only appear for a maximum of a few seconds unless they choose to stop and look. They also have the option to skip them entirely. Still, you have at least a fraction of a second to attempt to grab them, and you need to make it count. In these precious moments, we often have to communicate complex ideas, as well as a clear call to action. There is very little time to mince words.
The biggest challenge in these projects may have been the fact that my ability to AB test content was extremely limited. Early on, we were so focused on building new cards and seeing what stuck, that there was almost no time or budget to revisit or optimize existing cards. I had to work harder to interpret what was working and draw conclusions from tangential (but not direct) data.
Solution 1: Copywriting approach
Early on, I drew on my background in copywriting and focused on communicating benefits in interesting or clever ways. A sharing suggestion that included music used the header “Make your story sing.” A sharing suggestion that involved replacing the background of a photo using AI used the header “Reimagine your photo.”
At this stage, I was also very concerned about privacy. It can be alarming to see a photo you haven’t actually shared while using Facebook. To make things worse, our ability to suggest photos was very primitive. Most of the time, we would suggest the most recent photo in your camera roll. It’s easy to imagine how this could create panic in users. I worked hard to make sure it was clear this had not been shared yet. This included a design that looked different than a normal story, as well as body copy that made it clear that this has not been shared, and that they have the option to replace or edit the photo before they share it.
Solution 2: “What,” not “Why.”
After the midcard ecosystem had matured a bit, we noticed that midcards with shorter copy tended to perform better. A rare content test confirmed this. The prevailing theory was that shorter copy allowed for larger media previews, which were already a known metrics driver. However, shorter copy also performed better when the preview size was unaffected. This led to a much deeper, more meaningful insight: it’s not the “why” of the card, it’s the “what.”
In copywriting, as important as benefits are, they are irrelevant unless it’s clear what you actually have for sale. In most copywriting, this is easy to take for granted, because everyone knows what toothpaste is. The same is not true in tech. I realized that showing a benefit and call to action was all secondary to communicating what the hell the user was looking at.
Furthermore, while I didn’t want to discount copywriting best practices, I had to recognize that asking someone to share something is a fundamentally different kind of ask than asking them to buy something.