Instagram was originally designed as a photo-sharing platform which over the years has gained a constantly increasing amount of users. Recently, however, many Instagram features have enabled the platform to expand and meet the changing demands of its target audiences. Examples of this include the introduction of sharing posts to stories, reels, and Instagram direct messages.
Due to the emergence of equally popular competitors, including Twitter and Tik-Tok, Instagram decided to adapt and regularly add new features to ensure that it wasn’t left behind. Because of this, the platform has expanded beyond just publishing photos and videos.
The new features on Instagram allow regular users to share their personal life. But it has also become an area for businesses to boost their online presence and social media influencers to gain new followers and interact with their current fan base. By introducing features such as the insights tool to monitor the performance of your posts, Instagram helps businesses keep an eye on their social media progress as a company.
Find out below how Instagram has evolved in recent years to keep up with its competitors in meeting the new audience’s demands!
Introduction of new features for personal use
Introducing new features is essential in retaining the interest of your audience, but it also helps attract new users to the platform. Each new element added by Instagram is designed to meet its users’ needs and to gain an advantage over its competitors.
One of the most popular features added by Instagram recently includes short videos called reels. With the massively growing popularity of Tik-Tok, it has become evident that fun short videos are popular with the right audience. Instagram recreated this trend and introduced reels, often used for entertainment purposes. Reels allow users to include: multiple videos, captions, filters, interactive backgrounds and more. The popularity of reels has boosted the audience’s engagement while providing a fun visual alternative for users bored of the regular Instagram photos.
Unique and innovative features such as sharing others content to your personal story were handy for promoting business products but are also often used to share social movements close to the user’s heart. Features like this have become so popular that other platforms such as Tik-Tok have also used them.
Another recently introduced feature is by limiting the visibility of a single photo to appear on a user’s feed only once when posted by multiple accounts. This ensures that the audience doesn’t get frustrated seeing repetitive content and increases the possibility of exploring new posts that potentially would’ve been hidden further down past the feed.
Introduction of new features for business use
Instagram was one of the first platforms to take social media marketing seriously. Throughout its time, it has introduced various features to aid businesses in building a platform.
Some of the previous features that have made Instagram more business-friendly include the possibility of tagging brand products within an image, the same way you could tag accounts. Another was the shop bar, which made selling products from an online store more user-friendly. This increased sales and engagement for businesses advertising through Instagram. The introduction of insights tools has also allowed businesses the possibility to monitor their process and create a deeper understanding of their audience. These business tools include post-engagement rates, contact information on the profile and the possibility to promote your posts through Instagram’s advertisement.
Instagram’s most recently added feature was released in June 2021, where the maximum video duration for stories was increased to 60 seconds. Many platforms are expanding their maximum video length, also used by Tik-Tok, which recently increased its video lengths to 3 minutes. This is likely due to boosting the video’s watch time, which results in stronger performance as more audiences engage with its content, leaving plenty of time for the business to promote products in more detail or provide more varied content with longer footage durations that would not have been possible with a shorter video length.
Final thoughts
Overall, Instagram is no longer just a photo-sharing platform. It has become so much more. By introducing various unique features on a regular basis, it has maintained the interest of many of its current users and also managed to attract potential new users. These innovative developments have allowed Instagram to increase user satisfaction by offering the options for actions such as sharing stories, tagging products, posting multiple photos at once and more.
We are excited to see what else Instagram will come up with!
Get in touch with our social media experts today for more information on Instagram features!
