What New Feature Will Instagram Come Up With Next?

Instagram, just stop. I love you to death, but this is just too much for me.  And maybe for everyone?  I can only speak for myself, but Instagram keeps updating its Stories feature.  They’ve recently added polls and a way to keep past Stories, and they’ve been experimenting with cross-posts to WhatsApp.  (Yes, my head just exploded).  But now, they are trying to update Stories with something called Type.  Which gives you a number of new fonts to type your message with.  Ok, maybe I’m overreacting to this, but I just feel like this is never going to end.  I am all for product improvement where ever possible.  But doesn’t this seem like it’s too much?  Or is it just me?

But that’s not the only thing that’s happening with Instagram.  I’m going to digress for a moment and talk about Facebook, but I promise I will bring it back.  Facebook made a recent announcement saying that they’re shifting their focus.  Which, you probably already know.  But maybe what you didn’t know is how this shift is going to look.  Well, the new news feature feed will focus on the people that you want to hear from.  Which isn’t Pages.  So the possibility of fake news bombarding your news feed has been minimized. Where am I going with this?  This means that Facebook Pages are likely to die off.

So how does this relate to Instagram?  Facebook is kind of a social media marketing hub for small businesses.  If they don’t have a website, Facebook is a great place for them to put their contact information so everyone can find them.  Not only that, but they can also communicate with their customers.  Reaching customers is going to get harder as a result of this change.  Enter Instagram.  They have an extremely high engagement, so it makes sense that businesses may start to move over to Instagram in order to find their customers.  A lot of small businesses do this already, but I suspect the numbers are going to increase in this particular area.

Here’s a feature that we haven’t talked about on Saintel Daily yet.  Right now, users will only see posts in their feeds from other users that they follow and the sponsored content that Instagram shows them.  This may change soon, with Instagram testing a “recommended posts” feature.  It’s likely to be the same as Facebook. Which means Instagram’s algorithms will start showing users content their friends have liked, or content they think you’ll be interested in.  I actually kind of like this, because I like to find other accounts related to the things I like to look at.  I often see a lot of strange accounts when I scroll through the search feature and I wonder why they think I’m interested in that.

While I didn’t mean to be harsh on Instagram for introducing these changes.  Ultimately change is good.  But it’s hard to keep up with everything.  If you’re a power Instagram user, I can understand how this might be relatively easy to pick up on.  But if you’re trying to attract new users to your platform, maybe you should slow down on the updates?