How to Use Facebook Stories: Complete 2026 Guide

Quick answer: In the Facebook app, tap Create story at the top of your Feed, pick a photo, video or text card, add stickers, music or text, choose your audience (Public, Friends or Custom), then tap Share to story. It stays visible for 24 hours, then drops into your Story archive if the archive is switched on.

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Jump to: Post a Story | Specs and limits | Profile vs Page Stories | Stickers, music, links | Scheduling | Archive and highlights | Views and insights | Troubleshooting | FAQ

How to Post a Facebook Story

On mobile (the full feature set)

1. Open the Facebook app for iOS or Android
2. Tap Create story at the top of your Feed
3. Pick your format: a photo or video from your camera roll, a new capture, or a text card on a colored background
4. Add stickers, text, drawing or Music from the top of the screen
5. Set the audience: Public, Friends or Custom
6. Tap Share to story

Everything creative lives in the mobile app. Meta's music article is explicit that adding music needs the Facebook app for iOS or Android, and that music is not available to everyone yet.

On desktop

Desktop is a cut-down editor. You can build a photo Story or a text Story from facebook.com, but you cannot record video there, and several mobile features (music, most stickers, sharing across to Instagram) are simply absent.

For a Page, Meta's own instructions are: go to your Page, click Create story from your Page Feed, choose Create photo story, upload a photo from your computer, then edit it and click Share to story. That editor also has an Add button control in the left menu, which adds a button to view your shop on Facebook or visit a linked page.

Facebook Story Specs and Limits

These come from Meta's published Page Stories API specification, which is the only place Meta states Story media requirements in plain, readable text.

The 20-second figure that circulates in older guides is out of date. Anything longer than the cap gets trimmed or split rather than rejected outright, which is why people report inconsistent limits.

If you are running into wider publishing caps rather than Story caps, see our Facebook posting limits guide.

Profile Stories vs Page Stories

Most guides treat these as the same feature. They are not, and the differences decide what you can automate.

The practical takeaway: if you want a Facebook Story that can be scheduled, measured after the fact, or published by a tool, it has to be a Page Story. A personal profile Story is a manual, in-app, 24-hour object with nothing behind it.

Stickers, Music and Links

Meta's help article for Page Stories lists the sticker set as music, polls, location, feelings and GIFs, and states plainly that stickers cannot be added to text Stories. Music has the same restriction: it cannot be added to a text Story.

To add one on mobile: open your Story composer, add your photo or video, tap the sticker icon in the top right, choose the sticker, position it, then share.

What is not on Facebook. Quiz stickers, countdown stickers, emoji sliders and link stickers are Instagram Story features. Meta documents a link sticker for Instagram Stories; there is no equivalent Facebook Stories link-sticker article. "Swipe up" is gone entirely: Instagram retired the swipe-up gesture in August 2021 in favor of the link sticker, and it was never a general Facebook Stories feature. If a guide tells you to add a swipe-up link to a Facebook Story, it is describing 2020.

The one documented link-style control is the desktop Page photo Story Add button, which points at your Facebook shop or a linked page.

Can You Schedule Facebook Stories?

Personal profiles: no. There is no native scheduling anywhere in the Facebook app for a profile Story.

Pages: yes, in Meta Business Suite. Meta publishes a help article titled "Schedule posts and stories in the Meta Business Suite mobile app", and Business Suite's Content and Planner tabs cover Stories alongside posts and reels. The article bodies in the Business Help Center do not render for scraping, so treat the exact step wording as widely reported rather than quoted.

Two things worth knowing that most guides miss:

1. Meta Creator Studio is gone. It was folded into Meta Business Suite; publishing, scheduling and insights all live there now. Any guide still pointing you at Creator Studio or the old Publishing Tools tab has not been touched in years.
2. The Page Stories API has no scheduling parameter. It publishes immediately. That is why third-party schedulers hold your Story in their own queue and fire it at the scheduled minute rather than handing a future timestamp to Meta.

If you want the wider picture of what can and cannot be queued on Facebook, see our Facebook post scheduler guide. And if you started a Story or post and lost it, our guide to finding Facebook drafts covers where drafts actually live per surface.

Story Archive and Highlights

Story archive (profile). With the archive switched on, your photos and videos are archived automatically once they disappear from your Story, and only you can see the archive. Find it by clicking your profile picture, then Options, then Story Archive; the on/off switch is under Settings there. A Story you delete manually before it expires is not saved to the archive.

Story archive (Page). Pages have their own toggle. Go to the Page, open the three-dot menu below the cover photo, choose Story Archive, then the gear icon. Meta's wording: when the archive is on, your Page stories are saved to the archive after 24 hours.

Highlights. Adding a Story to a highlight keeps it on your profile until you remove it, and Meta notes that the people allowed to see your Stories are the same people who can see your highlights. Create one from your profile with the New button, name it, choose Stories, pick a cover, then Done.

Worth knowing if you post other people's photos: saving is not silent everywhere. See Facebook photo save notifications.

Who Viewed Your Story and Page Insights

Profile Stories. Open your Story and click Viewers at the bottom left. Meta's article confirms only you can see who viewed it, Facebook friends appear at the top of the list, and for a public Story you may see friends, followers and non-followers, with some grouped as "other people". Reactions show next to the viewer's name.

Meta does not publish how long the viewer list stays available. In practice it goes when the Story goes, which is why the archive gives you the media back but not the audience.

Page Stories. Reporting lives in Meta Business Suite under Content, filtered to Stories using the Posts and Stories dropdown. The one number Meta actually states in readable text is the retention: photos and videos remain viewable in Insights for 28 days. Treat detailed per-Story metric breakdowns you see quoted elsewhere with suspicion; Meta does not enumerate them in that article.

Troubleshooting

"Create story" is missing or greyed out. Update the app, then check you are in the app rather than a mobile browser. Several Story features, including sharing a Story across to Instagram, are mobile-only. Meta's own cross-posting article returns "this feature is not available on computer" when opened from a desktop.

Music is not showing. Meta says adding music to your Story is not available to everyone at this time, and music cannot be added to a text Story at all. Availability also varies by region for licensing reasons.

Nobody is seeing it. Check the audience first: if it is set to Custom or you have used "Hide story from", your reach is capped by that list, and anyone on your Restricted list cannot see your Story at all.

Your Story vanished early. A Story you delete yourself never reaches the archive. If the archive toggle was off, expired Stories are not kept either.

Reposting instead of restarting. If a Story performed well, the feed version of that content can be shared again rather than rebuilt. See how to repost on Facebook.

Frequently Asked Questions