The famous social network Instagram continues to surprise us with a host of new features.
It’s constantly developing and striving to meet the demanding expectations of its users.
Every month, not one but several new features are released.
We invite you to discover or rediscover them in this article.

Reels

Reels recently appeared on Instagram in France.
The aim is to compete with TikTok by capitalizing on the popularity of short 15-second videos.
You can create your own unique and original creations, taking advantage of proposed augmented reality effects, audio content from the music catalog, a timer and countdown timer to make your creation easier, and an alignment tool to enhance your transitions.

Indeed, TikTok is gradually gaining ground, with over 800 million monthly active users.
It is therefore essential for Instagram to innovate in order to capitalize on current trends.
According to the network, the aim is also to reveal new talent.

This new content format can be published in a story, on your News Feed or sent by private message to your loved ones.
If you decide to publish them on your feed, they will then be grouped together in a dedicated tab on your Instagram profile.
In the Explorer section, you may have already noticed that a selection of Reels appears in the first position.
This is a great way to quickly gain visibility.
If one of your Reels appears in the Explorer tab, Instagram will send you a notification.

So, are you ready to create your first Reels?

Of course, you’ll be able to preview your video and add music, change the speed, and enhance it with an effect suggested by Instagram.

Once you’ve created your Reels, you can add a final touch with a message, GIF or drawing, just like on a story.

Also, when you share a Reels, you can choose the cover photo by scrolling through the sequences of your video.
However, if you’d like to place one of your film stills on the cover, that’s perfectly possible too.

Fighting cyberbullying

On Youtube, it’s been possible to pin comments for a while now.
Now on Instagram, you can also select and pin a comment to the top of one of your posts using “Pin Comment”.
You can pin up to 3 comments per post.
The aim is to help combat cyberbullying by highlighting positive comments.

The technique differs according to the type of phone: for Android, simply long-press on a comment to display a blue bar with the pin icon.
And for iOS, simply swipe left on the comment you wish to pin to see the icon.

Instagram has also launched other complementary tools to enable influencers to combat cyberstalking.
Indeed, some of them receive numerous hateful comments on each of their posts, which can be very complicated.
To better manage these comments, it is now possible to delete several at once (up to 25).

You can also accept or refuse to be tagged and mentioned.
There are several options: to allow everyone to tag and mention us, or only by accounts subscribed to your account, or to refuse tags and mentions altogether.

For greater freedom, you can also manually validate each tag one after the other.

Lives on Instagram and IGTV

Another new feature concerns Instagram Lives.
Indeed, during containment this format recorded a 70% increase in views.
We were able to enjoy live cooking classes, sports lessons, make-up… To support these influencers, Instagram is launching the purchase of badges during Lives by users.
By purchasing one of the badges on offer, a heart will appear next to their name, giving their comments greater visibility.
The Lives creators will be remunerated from the amounts collected.

This new development will soon be tested on a small group and then rolled out in several countries, including France.

As for IGTV, here too there will be innovation for the benefit of influencers: from now on, ads will be visible directly in an IGTV.
The ads will be active when the user clicks on the IGTV from the feed.
IGTV creators will receive 55% of advertising revenues.
(This is similar to the revenue earned on Youtube).
As with the new Lives feature, advertising on IGTVs is currently being tested on a small group in the United States.

Instagram statistics

It’s also interesting to see changes in access to the social network’s statistics.
Previously, you had to go to the top-left tab and click on statistics.
Now you can access them directly on your profile, between the Promotions and Contact buttons.

Instagram Shopping

As of July 9, Instagram is also making it easier to use Instagram Shopping with updated eligibility criteria.
In concrete terms, this means that a greater number of businesses will now be able to use shopping tags to enable their community to buy their products directly via Instagram.
For the moment, this new feature is only available in the United States.

There are also plans to develop a direct payment service from the social network in the near future.
Everything is designed to simplify the act of buying.

Now that we’ve taken a look at what’s new on Instagram, we can’t wait to see how Reels in particular evolves and develops in relation to the competition: TikTok and Youtube.

From now on, everything can be accessed directly on Instagram, so there’s no need to switch social networks and go to TikTok to make a short-form video with effects.
As we saw in a previous article, video is a format that works extremely well for tourism players on social networks.
So it would be interesting to take advantage of these new innovations to develop brand awareness and visibility, loyalty and, of course, sales.

The social network is constantly improving to meet the needs of users, which will in turn improve the communication and influencer marketing operations carried out via this channel.
Everything is being done to improve the user experience, but above all to enhance communication between companies and influencers.

It remains to be seen whether or not Short’s arrival on Youtube at the end of the year will upset this system…