Yet another big feature will soon be making its way to Facebook. Just last week, the platform announced the upcoming release of Messenger Day, Facebook Messenger’s answer to Snapchat Stories.

Once the darling of Snapchat, self-destructing stories are no longer it’s unique selling point. With Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp now having very similar features, it’s clear the company is capitalising on a powerful tool. And now, Facebook has added yet another 24-hour “story” feature to its Messenger app, enabling users to share their moments. Entitled Messenger Day, this will be another fun way for users to snap selfies and videos, complete with art, text, and other colourful effects, and then share this with friends and family. And just like on Snapchat and Instagram, these will be viewable for 24 hours. With more than 5000 frames, stickers and art effects available, there’s certainly a lot more scope for creativity than its rivals currently offer. In conjunction with the platform’s camera feature launched late last year which has already gained popularity, the feature looks set for success.

So how can brands leverage this new tool? With over 1 billion monthly active users, the feature could gain steam amongst audiences who favour Messenger, or use it exclusively rather than Instagram or Snapchat. For marketers, the potential reach is therefore huge, with the product also offering the chance to display native ad content, and share ongoing daily updates with fans. According to Facebook, a staggering 566 million photos are already shared each day on the platform, showing further media sharing has the potential to be huge. An “Add to your day” button sits above the user’s list of message threads, with the latest stories displayed in a row- visually, it’s similar to Instagram Stories. For brands, this offers good visibility, and the familiar layout should attract users.

But should Messenger Day really become a new focus for marketers? The problem with launching such a similar feature that’s already available on Snapchat and Instagram, is how to make it stand out. With users already favouring the other two, how will the site ensure the feature doesn’t bomb, as has been the case with so many of its previous products? Rather than abandoning Instagram and Snapchat Stories, the key for brands will be to start sharing similar content that they already display on these platforms, and gauge the level of traction from Messenger. At this stage, it will be an interesting experiment for marketers to see if they can reach new audiences, and how many are engaging with their content.

For users though, early testing of Messenger Day has already shown up some disruptions, the main one being an “Add to your day?” notification, which appears when users send images to each other in private chats. This has the potential to turn audiences off- the risk of accidentally sharing a personal image with your network could be likely, and with no way to disable the feature, these notifications will continue to bombard private threads. There’s also the fact that users are already sharing moments from their day on Instagram, Snapchat, and even simply on their main Facebook mobile app itself- will another product be pointless? After all, there’s only so much interesting content we’d want to share at any time!

Are you looking forward to using Messenger Day? Do you think the feature will be popular with users and brands, or do you think Instagram and Snapchat continue to have an edge? We’d love to hear your thoughts, so please tweet to us @PracticeDigital and share your comments on our Facebook page.