Another year is coming to an end – and this one seems to have passed at the speed of light! Amid so many adaptations and uncertainties the world is still going through, Instagram didn’t give social media professionals a minute of rest.( Directory submissions ) It launched several news throughout 2021, from small details to significant changes.
Instagram Retrospective 2021
“Instagram is no longer a photo-sharing app.”
To open the 2021 Instagram Retrospective with the main news of the year, there is nothing better than starting with a statement about the new goals of Instagram, which made many people nervous at first.
In July 2021, Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, said the following sentence:
At first, a lot of people got scared, thinking that this would be the end of the photos on Instagram, but in fact, what Mosseri meant was something that was already very expected: from that moment on, Instagram was officially assuming that its objective was to invest more and more in video formats such as Reels, Lives, and Stories.
news for videos
Since they are now the focus, there was a lot of news related to videos on Instagram in 2021. Here we will highlight two: the end of IGTV and automatic captions.
Instagram kills IGTV
Since it was launch in 2019, IGTV has never really “caught.” At least not as much as Reels or Stories, which have the strength to even fight for the leading role with Feed.
And Instagram has caught on. Especially after some changes and updates to the video format for Feed, Adam Mosseri said that the company’s team began to notice that users no longer knew how to distinguish between IGTV and a regular video.Directory submissions
The solution was to do away with the separate tab for IGTV on profiles and the distinction between these types of videos, merging them all into a single general video tab on the profile. Check out the before and after to understand better:
automatic subtitles
Another novelty that came to facilitate this navigation and consumption of videos on Instagram was the automatic subtitles. In addition to being super important to promote more inclusion and accessibility for this type of content, they can also increase your reach and engagement.
As many users end up not watching videos with audio – either because they can’t or don’t want to at that moment – subtitles make it much easier to consume this content even without sound. And so that no one has the trouble of being caption sentence by sentence, Instagram decided to make our lives easier and expand its automatic captioning features! They arrived for feed videos and on Reels in a new sticker called Captions in Stories.Directory submissions
More resources for Lives
Lives were another format that gained an extra incentive in 2021, such as the arrival of Live Rooms, which allows live broadcasts with up to 4 profiles simultaneously and makes it very easy to bring guests from outside for a mass conversation!
Another novelty was the possibility of scheduling Lives, marking the date and time, and sending a reminder to all your followers who showed interest in that content. This helps a lot at the beginning when we open the video and wait for people to show up. So everyone already knows the time it is to arrive!
Finally, another novelty was the Practice Mode, which allows users to make a pre-transmission for themselves or select people to practice what they will say live beforehand.
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Monetization of video formats
new stickers
Another of our bets for this year was that Instagram would bet on more stickers to draw attention and increase engagement in Stories. For said and done✅
Link in stories
The first was not exactly a novelty but a format change. After many tireless requests from users: the much-desired link in Stories was releas to everyone on Instagram in sticker format.free directory submission sites
Before, the tool was only releas to users who reached the mark of 10,000 followers, making many people even want to buy followers (which we already know is not recommended at all, right? ) to get that “privilege.”
With the change also came the end of the popular “Drag up,” so used by brands and influencers, as the feature is now available in the sticker format in Stories, and users no longer need to drag the screen up to access it. Just one click, and that’s it! Much more intuitive, right?
use your
The other Sticker that drew attention in the final stretch of 2021 was Use Yours! The Sticker is a super cool form of interaction and went viral in several countries even before being releas globally. Directory submissions
The proposal is for a user to launch a theme or “challenge,” for example: post your last photo from the gallery, post your favorite song, etc. And the others share their Stories through the Sticker according to the theme. In addition to going viral frequently, the Sticker was a great way to give post ideas to users who often just needed an “excuse” to post the saved content.
Feed algorithm changes:
We’ve talked here on the blog a few times about how Reels works through a very different logic than the traditional Instagram Feed algorithm. ( Directory submissions) And this year, the algorithm was well impacted by some news that makes this ′′ logic ′′ increasingly similar to that of Reels.
Three changes this year have had a direct impact on the Feed, as they change the way posts are curated and displayed to users:
Suggested posts on Instagram
Suggested posts are now available to all users globally. With this new feature, Instagram has started to add in the middle of the seats; you follow some recommended posts from other accounts that may also interest you.
As a result, we start to see more often content in the Feed of accounts and people we don’t even know but that the algorithm understands has to do with our tastes. The idea is similar to what already happens in the Explore tab. The difference is that now these suggestions enter the middle of the main Feed and are not limit to a separate account.
Collabs: posts in collaboration
The feature of creating posts in collaboration with other users also affects what users see in the Feed, as it brings to the screen content made in partnership with profiles that you may still need to follow.directory submission sites
From the moment someone you follow creates a collab post with another user – be it a brand + influencer, two content creators, or even that friend of yours being tagged by her boyfriend – you start to receive new content in your Feed, and you can discover new people to follow. In other words: this is one more way to ensure that the content that reaches you is not limited to the accounts you follow.
