Top 8 New Instagram Features in 2021

Most of the features are very effective to boost the visibility and user engagement of your account.

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Without a single doubt, Instagram has become one of the most powerful social media platforms in the world. With over 1 billion users, Instagram is famous for its capability of generating the highest engagement rate. However, the platform is not only expanding but also evolving.

Over the past few years, the features on Instagram changed a lot. While some features were removed to increase the user’s credibility, some new features were also introduced to maintain the balance.

In this article, we will discuss 8 features and updates of Instagram in 2021.

Professional Dashboard

At the early stage of 2021, Instagram introduced a brand new tab known as the Professional Dashboard. Think of the Professional Dashboard as your main dashboard with the application or platform. Inside this new dashboard, you can find some primary resources and tools such as:

• Promotions
• Overall performance of your account
• Insights of Instagram
• Saved replies
• Instagram shopping
• Content approval

New Instagram Story Feature: Story Stickers

During the last few months, Instagram has included quite a bunch of brand new stickers in the Instagram story section. The primary purpose of these stickers is to boost the user experience. There are various interesting story stickers such as:

• Donation sticker
• Food orders stickers
• Challenge sticker
• Stay home sticker
• DM Me sticker
• Support small business sticker
• Gift cards sticker

Facebook Shops

Facebook has changed the whole world of e-commerce by rolling out Facebook shops that are accessible through both Instagram as well as Facebook. In short words, businesses can develop customizable catalogs for their services and products through which users can browse, share, save and purchase them.

All you need to do is just pick the product you want to advertise, and then add an interesting cover image and relevant theme to boost the attractiveness. Users can enjoy great customer service within the application and Facebook is constantly introducing new updates to make this user experience much smoother.

Uploading on Multiple Accounts

This feature is an ultimate time-saver, especially for users who have multiple Instagram accounts and they want to post the same content on both of the accounts. You need to upload your content through one account and then just allow some options to upload the content on other accounts.

However, don’t forget that the same content will be uploaded on both of your Instagram profiles. This feature isn’t extremely popular. People usually avoid posting the same content on two different Instagram accounts because that will decrease the engagement rate.

IGTV Preview

One of the most popular features of Instagram is getting huge popularity nowadays and that is the IGTV videos. They are also considered as the longer forms of Instagram videos.

So, to enhance the visibility of IGTV videos, Instagram started treating them as normal Instagram posts. This means that when you upload an IGTV video, it‘ll be seen in the newsfeed as well as the profile feed of your followers. However, remember that it will play a preview of 60 seconds that will attract the users. IGTV videos will help you to gain followers, but you can also buy followers on Instagram to increase the speed of the process.

You can also use the preview in your Instagram story. When you upload and share your IGTV videos on your Instagram stories, it will automatically play a 15-seconds preview to the users.

Dark Mode on Instagram

Instagram users have been anticipating dark mode on the application for quite some time. This will help them to save the battery life of their mobiles. Apart from that, the dark mode is also attractive. However, you cannot enable the dark mode from your Instagram application. You need to go through the general settings of your phone to activate the dark mode

For Apple users, follow these steps to activate dark mode:

• Make sure you have the compatible version of the operating system (iOS 13 or higher)
• Go to settings and click ‘Display and Brightness’
• Turn on ‘Dark Mode’
• Enjoy!

For Android users, follow these steps to activate dark mode:

• Make sure your device is running on Android 10 or later
• Go to settings, click ‘Display’
• Click on ‘Advanced’ and select ‘Dark Mode’ from the theme
• Enjoy!

New Inbox Organization

After the new updates rolled out, Instagram has changed the interface of the inbox by dividing them into Primary, General, and Requests tabs. Primary is the section where you’ll receive all the messages from the people that follow you. The rest of the messages will arrive in the Request tabs and you can move them either in Primary or General.

Think Primary as the section through which you can reply to messages quickly whereas you can read the messages in General later.

Suggested Unfollow

You may notice that sometimes you’re losing your followers. Or maybe you want to unfollow some accounts that are not interactive enough. Whatever the reason, Instagram has recently introduced this little feature that will suggest which people you should unfollow from your Instagram account.

You’ll receive two options: ‘least interacted with’ and ‘most shown in the feed’. The people with ‘least interacted with’ are your suggested unfollows.

Conclusion

These are the top 8 new features introduced by Instagram. As you can see, most of the features are very effective to boost the visibility and user engagement of your account. From more story stickers to dark mode, everything will make your experience smoother on the platform. As the social media platform is constantly growing and evolving, it’s better to be aware of the new features.