What's New on Instagram In 2024: The New Features, Updates, Algorithm
As we head into the second half of the year, let's examine all the changes across Instagram and how you can implement them into your content and social strategy.
What's New?
Stories
Instagram consistently updates its features on stories to encourage users to be more creative and to use its platform for longer. As story engagement strengthens, you should try to keep up with the changing updates to ensure that you can implement them into your strategy. If you get onto these updates before they become a trend, you could get a lot more traction and engagement for using a new feature that hasn’t been seen much, if at all, by your audience.
Instagram is currently testing a new story highlight feature called 'Lately.' This option saves your stories from the past seven days for your followers to view at any time on your profile.
This feature is particularly beneficial as it allows your followers to keep up with your brand even if they miss the initial story, increasing your brand's visibility and engagement.
It also has launched four new stickers on Stories, giving users fresh ways to connect.
These stickers are:
Add Your Music:
Like the regular 'Add Yours' sticker, the 'Add Yours Music' sticker lets you jump in on music trends.
You can share your favourite song or new music with your followers, who can add theirs and reshare.
Frames:
Frames is a new and inventive sticker that resembles a digital Polaroid. It's ideal for sharing memories with friends or reliving a special moment.
The Frames sticker turns any photo into an instant print. To reveal the content inside, your followers must shake their phones to develop the image, creating a memorable experience that will help with customer/ client brand recognition.
Reveal:
The Reveal sticker allows you to post a hidden story for your followers to uncover.
You’ll be prompted to type a hint about what your followers might find behind your blurred story. The only way for them to see the content is to send you a direct message.
The release of this sticker can be helpful for your content and social strategy. This sticker can be a good way for followers to get involved with your profile and products, improving your account's follower engagement. The more people engaging and interacting with your account, the more likely you are to gain increased brand awareness, followers and customer acquisition and have your account recommended to others.
Next time you need to advertise a soon-to-be-released product or tease an up-and-coming launch, think of these new updates as a creative way to get your announcement out there.
Cutouts:
The Cutouts sticker turns part of any video or photo in your camera roll into a Cutout sticker that you can add to a story or reel.
Once you create your cutouts, they are saved and easily accessible in your sticker tray so you can repeatedly return to them.
This sticker allows for more creativity in your stories. Usually, you would use a program such as Canva to create an effect like this. But Instagram strives to remove that extra step and allow it to happen inside the app.
Some stickers we recommend creating and having on hand, particularly for sporadic stories, include your logo or a tagline in your brand colours and fonts. This will allow you to keep your branding consistent and brand identity alive.
2. Marketplace
Instagram created Creator Marketplace in 2022 to allow brands to find creators they might want to connect with. You can filter through creators by gender, age, country, number of followers, demographics, and interests.
From there, you can use the Marketplace to create campaigns and projects to share with other creators. You can respond to brands and coordinate with them directly within the app.
In 2024, Instagram wants to continue building this strong sense of community in the Marketplace and expand its access to ten new markets: South Korea, Germany, Netherlands, France, Spain, Israel, Turkey, Mexico, Argentina, and Indonesia.
These expansions to the Marketplace will benefit your business, especially if you want that global reach. The Marketplace will continue to provide you and other brands with more opportunities to connect and collaborate.
3. Clear Mode
Instagram is testing a new feature called "Clear Mode" that will allow you to hide all of a Reel's description and user-interface details and descriptions so that you can focus on the video content.
This can benefit your Reel if you worry that people can become distracted or bored by the description before watching your video. By focusing solely on the video content, this feature could guarantee longer watch times and share rates, two key drivers of social reach on Instagram.
This feature will depend on your strategy. If your caption is more content-heavy and your goal is to have a shorter reel with more plays and easy access to the caption, this wouldn’t be a feature to use; however, if you want your audience to have a cleaner viewing experience and focus solely on the video's content, this feature will come in handy.
4. Search Experience
Instagram is updating to improve the search experience. They are simplifying the hashtag and search experiences on Instagram to make it easier to see everything.
Instagram wants to make it easier to comb through oversaturated hashtags. So now, when you tap on a hashtag, you'll see the search results for that specific hashtag. This should make finding accounts and posts relevant to your search easier.
You can still follow/unfollow, or report specific hashtags through this update.
This update can benefit your content, mainly if you use your SEO effectively. If you correctly use SEO and your content is new and relevant to those search results, your content will be more accessible for potential clients to find with this update.
5. Algorithm
This year, Instagram has introduced four changes to its algorithm:
Boost the reach of smaller creators:
Engagement of content is what boosts accounts.
Top-performing Reels or posts will be shown to a slightly wider audience as people engage with the content. Instagram will then show the best of these Reels and posts to an even wider group, and so on.
Watch rates, share rates, comments, and likes determine algorithm boosts regardless of the account's number of followers. This will allow smaller creators and businesses more opportunities to be recognised.
Replacing reposts with original content in recommendations:
Instagram's algorithm is becoming more strict on reposts. If it finds two or more identical pieces of content, it will only recommend the original one.
This change means original content will replace the reposted content in the app's recommendation and explore pages.
However, Instagram will not replace content that has been significantly changed, such as memes or parodies.
Adding labels to reposted content and linking back to the original creator:
Instagram has also started adding labels to reposted content, linking users to the original creator.
The label will be visible to followers of the account reposting it. The original creator or the account reposting the content can remove the label.
Removing content aggregators from recommendations:
Similar to how Instagram will replace reposts with the original, the accounts that repeatedly post content from other users that they didn't create will also not be shown in recommendations.
These accounts will become eligible for recommendations again after 30 days since the last time they posted unoriginal content.
The changes to the algorithm are intended to support small creators and businesses. The new Instagram algorithm requires producing original content.
If you need support across your social media or want a better understanding of how you can implement these changes, we are here to help. Fill out our contact form here or email us at jess@thesocialinsider.com for more information.
