Five of Instagram’s Must-See Features in 2022

 



















​Instagram has long been one of the most popular social media platforms and remains so today. Research shows this social media platform has more than one billion active users, making Instagram an attractive platform for marketers.
 
With the addition of Reels in 2020, Instagram transformed from a photo-sharing app to a one-stop platform where you can find all the entertainment you need in one place. To help savvy marketers reach Millennials and Gen-Zers on this social media platform, Allen Marketing Communications, Inc., a boutique travel and lifestyle public relations agency based in New York City, spotlights five new features on Instagram.
 
Stories
Instagram stories are snippets of your day that can be customized with stickers, polls, music, and more. With Instagram’s new update, you can now post a story that’s up to 60 seconds long with no cuts as opposed to the old format of 15-second clips with cuts in between.
 
In addition, you don’t have to worry about customizing each new clip as whatever you add to the story will remain throughout the entire 60 seconds for a smoother playback.
 
Closed Captions
Instagram announced the addition of auto-generated captions for videos on users’ feed earlier this year in an effort to make Instagram more accessible to those in the deaf/hard-of-hearing communities. According to Prestige, “Instagram said in a Twitter post that users will have the option to turn the captions on or off and they are currently available in 17 languages with more to come.“
 
“More recently, Instagram has added AR captions for Reels to make them more eye-catching,” according to Prestige. In addition to the regular closed captions option, there are bubble captions that look like text message chats, mumble captions that come straight from your mouth, and comic captions that give your video a comic book effect.
 
Feed Order
Instagram has recently announced that they would be testing new options for their feed. According to embed social, “the three options are home, following, and favorites; home functions the same as the regular algorithm has these past few years, ranking the content based on how interested it thinks the user will be in the post.” The following tab is the old version of Instagram’s feed, putting all posts in chronological order of everyone the user follows, and favorites only shows posts from the user’s favorites list.
 
This new update allows users to choose whose posts they see, whether they like the current algorithm and want to stick with it, want to switch back to the old chronological feed, or only want to see the posts of their favorites.
 
Hiding Likes
Instagram has allowed users to choose whether they want their followers to be able to see their like count on each post. According to NapoleonCat, “The main reason for giving users this option was to “depressurize Instagram for young people.”
 
Likes became a popularity contest and often affected the mental health of teens using the app, so the goal was to “bring back the joy of posting” (Mikolajczyk 2022) to people who were impacted by like counts. The practice of buying likes is also likely to decrease, meaning there will presumably be less fraudulent accounts on the app.

​Pin Your Favorites
Ever wished you could keep a certain post you loved where everyone could see it, no matter how old it was? Well, now you can, with Instagram’s grid pinning update that allows you to pin three posts or Reels to the top of your grid so users will see them first when they visit your profile. Let your favorite content shine!
 
Instagram is on a path to becoming more accessible and streamlined for users as it adds new features almost every month. Our team of savvy social media and influencing marketers are here to help.  Give us a call.
 
By Marley Merrihew at Allen Marketing Communications, Inc.

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