More than 300 million people are now using Instagram's 'Stories' feature every day, up from 250 million in June when the company last announced figures.

The new milestone was revealed in Facebook's earnings call with analysts last night, as the social network announced its latest set of quarterly financials.

"Over the next three years, the biggest trend in our products will be the growth of video. This goes both for sharing, where we've seen stories in Instagram and status in WhatsApp grow very quickly, each with more than 300 million daily actives, and also for consuming video content," said CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The obvious comparison is with Snapchat, which pioneered the stories format, but which has seen its growth rate outstripped by Instagram since the latter launched its version in August 2016.

Snapchat ended the second quarter of 2017 with 173 million daily active users, although the company is about to publish its Q3 financial results, which will provide an update on that figure.

As for Facebook itself, the social network revealed that it averaged 1.37 billion daily active users in September 2017, up 16% year-on-year. Meanwhile, its monthly active user total grew by 16% to 2.07 billion.

Influencers operating on Facebook will have noted the company's continued emphasis on video.

"When done well, video brings us closer together. We've found that communities formed around video like TV shows or sport create a greater sense of belonging than many other kinds of communities. We found that live videos generate 10 times the number of interactions and comments as other videos," said Zuckerberg.

"But too often right now, watching a video is just a passive consumption experience. Time spent is not a goal by itself. We want the time people spend on Facebook to encourage meaningful social interaction. So we're going to focus our products on all the ways to build community around the videos that people share and watch."