Private likes on Stories are part of a limited test. The feature is only visible to a small group of people around the world. The company said that the person who posted the Story can only see the total number of likes and that there isn't any plans to make the like count public.
Meta is always working on ways to help people connect with those they care about, according to an email. Story Likes is a way for people to react to stories that are not seen by the author.
Many users have revealed that they have seen the feature and have posted pictures of it on social media. Users who are part of the test will receive a notice stating that they may receive likes on their stories.
The laughing, surprised, heart eyes, teary-eyed, clap, fire, celebration and 100 emoji are some of the options that can be used to reply or react to a story. The person who posted the Story is able to see the total number of reactions they have received for each emoji. The introduction of likes on stories would allow users to engage with stories in a new way. It also gives users a new way of measuring engagement on their Stories in the same way as their posts.
As the platform now allows users to hide like counts on their posts, the experiment with likes on Stories comes as a surprise. The option was rolled out to all users in May of last year. This latest test shows that the company doesn't have any plans to make likes on Stories visible to the public, so they will continue to focus on private likes.
The social media platform has been looking for more ways to get users to engage with Stories, as it recently introduced a new "Add Yours" sticker that creates public threads in Stories. Users can respond to other users' Stories with their own following a prompt or topic. The interactive sticker can be used to create a content chain. The new sticker is similar to TikTok's "duet" feature, which allows users to create content featuring an original video.
