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Instagram’s new Stories features are meant to encourage community, and the company doesn’t want this activity to take place in closed groups, away from advertisers.
The social media giant is releasing a new tool that will allow users to leave comments under their followers’ stories. These comments will only be visible to followers, and only those who follow the user back can leave comments. Users can also turn off the feature.
The rise of private messaging and closed groups is creating waves of change across social media, especially influencing user posting behavior. For example, this new tool combines two of Gen Z’s favorite features: Stories and DMs.
“When we look at how teens are spending their time on Instagram, they’re spending more time in direct messages than stories, and they’re spending more time in stories than feed.” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said: “At one point a few years ago, we actually had our entire Stories team run messaging,” he said on a podcast with venture capitalist Harry Stebbings.
As users spend more time in Instagram DMs, it results in a smaller audience for advertisers to target through Meta’s powerful marketing platform, so if this feature can encourage users to start conversations within Stories rather than DMs, they’ll be more likely to continue swiping through Stories where ads appear (a win for Instagram).
Stories are automatically deleted after 24 hours, so these comments exist as temporary conversations.
Some influencers are excited about the possibility of building communities within their stories and encouraging conversations among their followers.
“Stories are going to feel more like livestreaming, and I think that’s going to become a trend,” influencer Arianna Nasani said. “It’s definitely going to keep people in their story feed for a lot longer. As someone who posts more stories than feed posts, I’m super excited about that.”
Influencer Anushka Purohit said she was excited about the feature as it would spark more public conversation.
“I have been waiting for a feature like this for a long time because I want to create conversations around everything I post and I have always struggled to decide whether to post on my story or on my feed,” Purohit said.
Instagram has also started rolling out a new design for likes on posts and reels. In the new design, some likes will appear as floating hearts next to your profile picture. When a user taps on the floating heart, it will be sent to a DM chat with that person.