The social network wants to encourage exchanges in stories, without cluttering the DMs of its users.
After betting everything on its Reels for a few months, Instagram has just presented a new feature dedicated to stories. Until now, the Likes distilled on the social network mainly concerned publications integrated into the main feed. If it were indeed possible to interact with a story, this was done only via sending a DM, as an emoji or directly as a text message. For the most popular Internet users, each publication thus led to a flood of new private messages, which could prove to be a little invasive.
Declutter influencer DMs
❤️ Private Story Likes ❤️
Starting to roll out today, you can now send some love by liking people’s stories without sending a DM.
Likes on stories are private and do not have counts. Rather, they appear as hearts next to people’s handles in your Stories view sheet. 🙏🏼 pic.twitter.com/l56Rmzgnnw
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) February 14, 2022
Always in line with its goal of making life easier for its most influential content creators, Instagram has just rolled out private Likes. According to the boss of the social network Adam Mosseri, these will simply allowlike content published in story, without cluttering the inbox of its owner: “The idea here is to make sure people can express more support for each other, but also to clean up the DMs a bit.”
A way also for the company to clean up its messaging, while it aims to merge Instagram and Facebook Messenger in the coming months: “Messaging is a key priority for us”, confirmed Adam Mosseri, who now indicates that he wants to reserve DMs for private exchanges. If this addition will not revolutionize the platform, it sounds like a rather practical novelty.
The TikTok threat
It must be said that for Twitter as for Instagram, the hour is no longer at rest. The two social networks have long served as market leaders, but the arrival of Chinese TikTok has reshuffled the cards in a now fragmented market. For historical platforms, the time is now for renewal, with the regular addition of new features, sometimes new and sometimes directly inspired by the competition.