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A Facebook Story is the full height of a phone screen, which sounds generous until you notice that the top and bottom of that screen are already occupied — by your own name, by the close button, by the reply box. The usable area is the band in the middle, and designing for the full frame is why so many stories have their captions sitting under a text field.
A Story is 1080 × 1920 pixels — 9:16, the full-screen vertical shape that every short-form surface now uses. Anything else gets letterboxed against a background Facebook picks, or cropped.
There is no benefit in exporting larger. Facebook re-encodes on upload, so a 2160 × 3840 file is scaled down and the extra data discarded. 1080 × 1920 at a reasonable quality is the target.
This is the part that decides whether a story works:
So the dependable area is the middle ~66%, which on a 1920-pixel frame is roughly the region from 270 px down to 1550 px. Headlines, captions, prices, calls to action and anything someone needs to read all belong inside it.
The common failure is predictable: a caption placed at the very bottom, where captions naturally go in any other medium, lands behind the reply box. The second most common is a logo in the top corner, sitting under the gradient and behind your own profile photo.
A feed post is square or 4:5. A Story is 9:16 — much taller. Reusing one as the other forces a choice, and both options have a cost.
Crop to fill. The image covers the whole screen, which looks right, but a 4:5 image cropped to 9:16 loses roughly a third of its width. Anything near the left or right edge is gone, and text laid out for a square composition usually breaks.
Fit with padding. The whole image survives as a horizontal band with space above and below. Nothing is lost, and that empty space is useful — it is exactly where a caption can go without colliding with the interface. Less immersive, but it is the honest option when the image cannot be re-cropped.
The better answer, when you have the original, is to recompose at 9:16 rather than convert. A story is a different shape, not a resized feed post.
A photo story displays for about 5 seconds. That is the real constraint on how much text a story can carry: five seconds is enough for one short line, not a paragraph.
Video runs up to roughly 20 seconds per card; longer footage is split into consecutive cards, which is fine but means the viewer can drop out between them — so the first card has to carry the point.
For the file itself, MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio is the safest combination. It is what every phone produces, and it survives Facebook’s re-encoding with the least damage.
Keep the file to a few megabytes. A 30 MB export does not survive re-encoding any better; it just takes longer to upload.
Both platforms use 9:16, so the image itself transfers cleanly. The interface does not: the two apps place their controls differently, and an Instagram story whose text sits just above Instagram’s reply area can land underneath Facebook’s.
If a story is going to both places, keep the text well inside the middle band rather than tuned to either app’s exact layout. The middle 66% is safe on both.