It seems there’s no shortage of innovation over at Meta HQ, with Instagram rolling out a tonne of new features over the past month (and often managing to sneak them into app updates without any fanfare!). Honestly, who can keep up anymore? It’s lucky you have us to keep you updated and in the loop with the latest and greatest. Hold the applause, it’s just what we do. Let’s dive in.
Auto-generated captions to feed video posts
Instagram is continuing to improve its accessibility for hearing-impaired users, now introducing auto-generated captions for video posts. You might have enjoyed using the caption sticker in your stories before, which was the first iteration of this tool - but now, you can implement it for your in-feed video posts and Reels as well. We highly recommend using this new tool FYI, to cater to all the users who like to scroll their feeds with audio off (or are too shy to do so when scrolling in public). With 17 languages already accessible for use with the tool, we think this was a great and natural move - but hey, only as long as it’s better than YouTube’s notoriously terrible auto-generated captions.
Create Reels from your Story Highlights
A lot of us balk at the idea of making a Reel - it just feels like so much time and effort to spend on one piece of content sometimes. The good news is, you can kickstart your account’s Reels feed by creating some right off the bat with Instagram’s newest tool for Highlights. If you navigate to your Highlights you may find a button with the Reel icon labelled ‘Create’ (note: “may”, because not all users have reported seeing this feature yet). Tapping this button will send you to a page where you can sync up some music and convert that Highlight into a newly posted social video Reel. The good news? This is great for repurposing content and giving it new life. The bad news? Any well-intentioned new tool can be abused, so it just might open the floodgates to seeing the same content over and over again…
Private Story likes
Ever checked your Instagram DMs and found your inbox flooded with “___ reacted to your story”? Yeah, pretty annoying stuff, and it looks like our cries of irritation were heard by Insta themselves. Story reacts have now been replaced with likes, whereby users can send a small “like” with a simple bottom-right-hand-corner tap and your notification stream will be interrupted a little less. The Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri noted this as being a great way to ‘clean up DMs’, but some users have reported now getting the notification in their general post notification stream, so it seems like much of a muchness to us. However, it does create a new engagement metric - you can privately see who has ‘liked’ one of your Stories by opening your Stories view sheet. They won’t appear as a count, and they won’t appear publicly either, but it remains an effective way to gauge audience interaction.
"Your activity" feature
As data privacy and user behaviour tracking scrutiny grow with Web 3.0, our social media platforms are adjusting to these new user concerns with the latest example being Instagram’s new Your activity section. It’s a great tool that also comes to fruition in light of the fact that many of us simply need better management over our Instagrams - with businesses and brands increasingly using the platform as an integrated content hub and customer service front, the ability to sort through content, interactions and more is a welcome addition. Whether it’s batch-deleting or batch-archiving content or searching through comments for that one specific piece of feedback you remember, this new feature can likely reduce your dependence on third-party apps and subscriptions which have provided this solution in the past.
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