Welcome to the new Instagram vortex, where you start innocently enough looking at the story of your friend’s baby shower and find yourself two hours later eyeballs deep in a video of a dog skateboarding in sunglasses.
In a bid to dominate their arch rival, Snapchat, Instagram has been pumping out updates faster than our team runs when there’s free pastries in the kitchen! So grab a croissant and settle in as we take you on a tour through the latest changes.
Location stories
The most recent update now allows fans to add their location to their Story, which doesn’t sound that exciting but wait, there’s more! If you tap on the location, the app will take you to a page of posts from the same location. It’s like Happn but less about hook ups and more about seeing what a stranger on the other side of the city is having for lunch. So far this feature is only available in major cities but we can see Instagram rolling it out further. Not feeling it? There’s an option to opt out so your story doesn’t show up.
Hashtags
Ever take a #lit story and then wallow in the fact that it’s being wasted on your 25 followers? Instagram feels your pain and has come to the rescue with it’s new hashtag feature. Instagram now lets you add hashtags to your Stories so that it can be discovered and enjoyed by the whole Instagram community!
Face filters
Sound familiar? We thought so too but hey, when the universe gifts us with more options to take our selfies from “Haven’t washed my hair in two weeks” to Beyoncé levels of flawless, we don’t complain #IWokeUpLikeThis. Practically, it works the same way as Snapchat filters just with fewer options.
Rewind
As the queen of tracksuits, Missy Elliot, once said “I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it” and now you can too with the new rewind feature on Instagram stories! It’s pretty straight forward, when you open Story mode you have all the regular options to shoot in: Normal, Live, Boomerang, Hands-Free, and now Rewind Mode. Reverse mic drop!
Now it’s time to sit back and watch the likes roll in!
